Srikanth Iyengar honored with Distinguished Alumni Award from IIT Madras

Srikanth Iyengar, Professor in the Department of Mathematics, College of Science, has been honored with the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.  The Distinguished Alumni Award honors alumni who have made exceptional contributions in their fields through professional excellence, societal impact, or significant influence in their industries.

Professor Iyengar is a distinguished mathematician and an outstanding alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, whose career stands as a testament to intellectual rigor, scholarly depth, and enduring commitment to the mathematical sciences.  Prof. Iyengar received his B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Madras in 1991, and subsequently earned his MS (1994) and PhD (1998) in Mathematics from Purdue University.

Currently a professor at the University of Utah, Prof. Iyengar has built an extraordinary body of work in commutative algebra, homological algebra, and modular representation theory.  With over 117 refereed publications to his name, his research has fundamentally shaped the modern understanding of stratification of triangulated categories, support theory, and local cohomology.  His landmark paper, co-authored with Benson and Krause on the stratification of modular representations of finite groups and published in the Annals of Mathematics, stands as a celebrated contribution to algebra in recent decades.

Prof. Iyengar's achievements have been recognized with numerous prestigious honors.  He was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize by the Humboldt Foundation in 2007, elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013, and named a Simons Fellow in Mathematics in 2012-2013.  He held the Willa Cather Professorship at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln and received the Eisenbud Research Professorship at SLMath, Berkeley in 2024.  In 2026, he will deliver an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, one of the highest distinctions in the mathematical world.

Beyond his research, Prof. Iyengar has been a prolific mentor, guiding more than twenty doctoral students across the University of Nebraska - Lincoln and the University of Utah, many of whom have gone on to distinguished academic careers of their own.  He has co-authored two significant books, including the widely used graduate text, "Twenty-Four Hours of Local Cohomology," published by the American Mathematical Society.  He has also served in leadership roles on the editorial boards of leading journals, including the Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra and International Mathematics Research Notices, and he has been continuously supported by the National Science Foundation as Principal Investigator over multiple grant cycles.

In recognition of his extraordinary contributions to mathematics, his exemplary mentorship, and his role as a global ambassador for the discipline, IIT Madras has awarded Prof. Iyengar the Distinguished Alumni Award for 2026.

Taken from https://acr.iitm.ac.in/latestdaas/prof-srikanth-b-iyengar/.