Professor Rajeeva L Karandikar is an expert on Statistics and Probability. After his Ph. D. at Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata in 1981, Dr Karandikar spent some years as visiting professor in USA and returned to Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi in 1984 as an Associate Professor. He became a full professor in 1989 and served as Head of department of Mathematics and statistics at the Institute and also as Head of Delhi Centre. He has been a visiting professor at several universities in USA and Europe. In 2006, he moved to Cranes Software International Limited as Executive Vice President – Analytics. He moved to Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI), Chennai, India in 2010 and was its Director from Jan 2011 till April 2021. He is now Professor Emeritus at CMI.  

Dr Karandikar has made significant contributions to various areas including Stochastic Calculus, Filtering theory, Markov processes and martingale problems, limit theorems, Monte Carlo techniques, Queuing theory, Game theory, Theory of option pricing. He has authored two books with Professor G Kallianpur, one on filtering theory and one on option pricing and one with Prof B V Rao on Stochastic Calculus. He is a fellow of Indian National Science Academy and Indian Academy of sciences and has been awarded the young scientist medal by Indian National Science Academy (1985), S S Bhatnagar prize by Council of Industrial and scientific research (1999) and C R Rao National award in statistics by Government of India (2000).

Dr Karandikar has been involved in numerous consultancy projects over the years. He has worked on development of proprietary Blockcipher algorithms for Indian defence services. He had developed a module on MCMC – Markov chain Monte Carlo – for SYSTAT – a general purpose statistical software. He has done statistical consultancy work for government agencies such as Election commission of India, Food Corporation of India, Gujarat State electricity board, Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI), Central Board for secondary education (CBSE), and several companies including ICICI Bank, Tata Consultancy Services, Tech Mahindra. He was a member of the technical committee setup by the Election Commission of India to advice it on sampling of the booths matching votes recorded in EVM and in paper ballot (VVPAT) in 2018-19.

Dr Karandikar has been involved with opinion polls and exit polls in India for over 2 decades (1998-2019). He has worked with India Today, Doordarshan, T V Today (Aaj Tak) and CNBC, CNN-IBN, ABP News along with The Hindu, Times of India, Indian Express,…   for opinion polls.

Dr Karandikar has been an Editor of Sankhya and on the editorial board of Annals of Probability.