Saket Saurabh, Professor in the Theoretical Computer Science group of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai has been awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology 2021 in Mathematical Sciences. This award is given by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) India and it is considered to be the most coveted science prize in India. The awards for this year were announced on the CSIR Foundation Day. 

Prof Saket Saurabh completed his PhD in Theoretical Computer Science from IMSc in 2008. After a Postdoctoral stint at the University of Bergen, Norway, he joined IMSc as faculty member in 2009. He has done pioneering work on parameterized complexity (a recent approach to computationally hard problems), graph algorithms, satisfiability problems and more, according to a release. He has co-authored two books and several popular surveys on parameterized complexity. 

He has mentored 14 PhD students, including 13 at IMSc. Prof  Saurabh has twice received a European Research Council grant, is a recipient of the 2020 ACM India Early Career Researcher award and was elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2020.