We are delighted to announce that ICTS faculty members Rama Govindarajan and T. N. Venkataramana have received the 2026 INSA Distinguished Lecture Awards in the Engineering & Technology and Mathematical Sciences sections, respectively.
The INSA Distinguished Lecture Awards are conferred on Fellows of the Indian National Science Academy in recognition of outstanding research excellence. Notably, ICTS has had an awardee every year since the awards were instituted three years ago, with three ICTS faculty members receiving the honour last year.
Prof. Venkataramana received the award for “making transformative contributions to arithmetic groups, locally symmetric spaces, and geometric representation theory, publishing regularly in top journals including the Annals of Mathematics and Inventiones Mathematicae. His landmark 1988 paper extended Margulis’ superrigidity and arithmeticity theorems to semisimple groups over local fields of arbitrary characteristic. He proved important cases of the Margulis-Zimmer conjecture and, with Clozel, established a Lefschetz-type theorem for Shimura varieties. His later work demonstrated that large classes of hypergeometric and Lauricella monodromy groups are arithmetic, and with Lubotzky resolved a forty-year-old problem on free groups. In 2014, he determined the image of the Burau representation of braid groups at roots of unity.”
Prof. Govindarajan was recognized for “outstanding contributions to fluid dynamics, particularly in the study of particle-laden and stratified flows. Her work has significantly advanced the theoretical understanding of sedimentation, turbulence, and flow stability through elegant minimal models, analytical breakthroughs, and influential reviews that have shaped the fluid mechanics community.”
ICTS warmly congratulates Profs. Govindarajan and Venkataramana on this prestigious recognition.