With barely three months left for his retirement, a statistics teacher at St Anthony’s College in Meghalaya’s Shillong, Sanku Dey, is topping off his career by securing a place on Stanford University’s list of the top 2% of scientists in the world for the fifth year in a row.
Of the 1.17 crore researchers evaluated globally, only an estimated 2.34 lakh made it to the list, which included 23,549 statisticians. He has been ranked at 54,006 on the list, finding the 267th spot among statisticians. The certificate mentions mathematics and statistics as his main field. Notably, he is the first one from the Northeast to achieve this feat.
In 2021, his global ranking among the 2% of scientists was 1,04,260. It went up to 1,07,863 in 2022. He improved in 2023 with a rank of 51,491 but then slipped to 57,410 in 2024.
Stanford’s 2% list is developed with Elsevier, a Dutch academic publishing company that provides scientific, technical and medical information solutions. The exercise entails identifying acclaimed researchers based on standardised bibliometric indicators like total citations and h-index scores. Data from the Scopus database is used in the process. The list features researchers with significant impact and excellence, representing 2% of all scientists worldwide.
A postgraduate in statistics from Gauhati University, Dey is the youngest of five siblings—all men. He did his schooling at his birthplace, Kharupetia, a small town in Assam’s Darrang.
His teaching career spans three decades, during which he has taught at Kokrajhar College, Gauhati University, Banaras Hindu University and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz University. His stint at St Anthony’s College began in 2000. He now heads the Department of Statistics there.
Ask Dey about his passion for the subject, and pat comes his reply: “It was only when I was doing my honours in the subject that I fell in love with it. I cannot tell you why I pursued my education in statistics. I just picked it. Now when I ask my students this question, even they cannot give me an answer.”
