Science Awards 2026 — Infosys Prize 2025 Complete Winners with Profiles

Three things stand out about the 2025 Infosys Prize cohort when you look across the six categories together.

The first is the range between fundamental and applied. On one end, Sabyasachi Mukherjee's work on complex dynamics — tracing the connections between Mandelbrot sets and three-dimensional hyperbolic geometry — has no immediate real-world application. The jury selected him because his results are mathematically profound and because they connect fields that had previously seemed unrelated. On the other end, Karthish Manthiram at Caltech has spent his career on a problem with an immediate and enormous practical consequence: how do you make ammonia — the molecule that fertiliser is built from, and therefore the molecule that feeds roughly half the world's population — without burning natural gas? His electrochemical routes using renewable electricity represent a real engineering advance toward decarbonising chemical industry.

The second is the India connection across winners based outside India. Nikhil Agarwal is at MIT, Sushant Sachdeva is in Toronto, Andrew Ollett is in Chicago, Karthish Manthiram is at Caltech. The only winner based in India is Anjana Badrinarayanan at NCBS Bengaluru. This reflects something real about where the best-resourced research environments are, and it also reflects the foundation's explicit decision to follow the science wherever it leads rather than restrict recognition to India-based researchers. The policy requiring overseas winners to spend a month at an Indian institution — introduced in 2024 — creates at least a thread of connection back.

The third is Anjana Badrinarayanan herself. She is the first person to have received the Infosys Prize for work done at NCBS Bengaluru, and her selection represents the recognition of a domestic research institution as a global-quality environment for life sciences research — which is what it is. Her discovery of novel mitochondrial DNA repair pathways is genuinely new knowledge, not a derivative of work done elsewhere first.

Economics — Nikhil Agarwal (MIT, Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics)
Agarwal's field is called market design — the branch of economics concerned with how allocation mechanisms actually work and how to make them work better. Unlike most economics, which takes existing market structures as given and tries to understand their properties, market design asks: given what we want an allocation system to achieve, what rules should govern it? Agarwal's contribution is methodological as much as theoretical. He developed empirical tools — ways to measure and test how matching mechanisms perform in practice — that have been applied to how students are assigned to schools, how medical residents are matched to hospitals, and how patients receive kidney transplants from living donors. His work on kidney exchange mechanisms, in particular, deals with a situation where standard market pricing (paying for organs) is illegal and social, and where the allocation problem has to be solved without money. He showed how to make these systems more efficient using mechanism design theory and a new approach to estimating preferences from observed choices.

Engineering and Computer Science — Sushant Sachdeva (University of Toronto)
Sachdeva builds algorithms — step-by-step computational procedures for solving mathematical problems — and he builds them faster than people thought possible. His specific focus is on problems involving flow networks and linear programs, which sit at the heart of logistics, internet routing, financial modelling, and transportation planning. The classical methods for solving these problems run in time proportional to some polynomial function of the input size; Sachdeva's results have produced algorithms that run in what theorists call "almost linear time" — nearly as fast as it is theoretically possible to go. His results have been described in the press coverage around the prize as producing "absurdly fast algorithms," which is a deliberate provocation from theorists who mean that the speed achieved seems almost impossible given what we previously thought about the problem's hardness. The practical consequence is that problems previously too large to solve in reasonable time now become tractable.

Humanities and Social Sciences — Andrew Ollett (University of Chicago)
Andrew Ollett is described in the prize citation as the world's foremost scholar of the Prakrit languages in his generation. Prakrit is not one language but a family of them — the spoken languages of ancient South Asia, distinct from Sanskrit, in which a substantial portion of India's classical literary and religious heritage was composed. Texts in Pali, Ardhamagadhi, Maharashtri, and other Prakrits record some of the oldest layers of Buddhist, Jain, and secular Indian literature. Despite this, Prakrits have received far less scholarly attention than Sanskrit or even classical Tamil, partly because the field demands mastery of multiple scripts, grammatical traditions, and manuscript cultures simultaneously.

Ollett has worked on the grammatical theory of Prakrit, on the circulation of Prakrit texts across the Indian subcontinent, and on the cultural history of what it meant for a poet or a religious author to choose Prakrit over Sanskrit in a particular moment and context. The jury described his work as revealing a dimension of Indian literary culture that had been systematically underread. He is the first scholar of ancient Indian languages to receive the Infosys Prize in Humanities and Social Sciences.

Life Sciences — Anjana Badrinarayanan (National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru)
Badrinarayanan's laboratory works on how cells respond when their DNA is damaged. DNA damage is a constant occurrence — ultraviolet light, chemical exposures, errors in replication all create breaks, mismatches, and modifications in the genome every day. Cells have elaborate repair machinery to fix most of this damage before it causes mutation or death. Badrinarayanan has uncovered specific mechanisms within this repair system that were not previously understood, particularly in the context of mitochondrial DNA — the small separate genome that sits inside each mitochondrion (the cell's energy-producing organelles). Mitochondrial DNA is more vulnerable to damage than nuclear DNA and has fewer known repair pathways; her discovery of novel response mechanisms there addresses a real gap in the field's knowledge. The jury noted that her findings reveal "universal strategies that cells use to safeguard their genomes" — meaning the mechanisms she identified are likely present across species, not just in the model organisms she used in her experiments.

Mathematical Sciences — Sabyasachi Mukherjee (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai)
Mukherjee works in an area of mathematics called complex dynamics — the study of how iterating a complex function (applying it repeatedly to its own output) creates structure in the complex plane. The most famous example is the Mandelbrot set, whose fractal boundary encodes information about which starting points under iteration remain bounded and which escape to infinity. Mukherjee has been developing deep connections between the theory of complex dynamics and the theory of Kleinian groups — mathematical structures that describe hyperbolic three-dimensional geometry and were central to some of the most celebrated results in topology and geometry over the past forty years.

The jury's citation described his work as "reshaping the understanding of conformal dynamics" — a phrase that signals he is not just filling in details within an established framework but actively changing the map of what the field looks like. He received the Vigyan Yuva–Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award under the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar 2025 in the same year, making him one of a handful of researchers recognised simultaneously by India's largest private science award and by the government's highest science honour system.

Physical Sciences — Karthish Manthiram (California Institute of Technology)
The Haber-Bosch process has been making ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen for more than a century. The ammonia goes into fertilisers, which in turn go into growing food for roughly half the world's current population. The problem is that the Haber-Bosch process runs at high temperatures and pressures and uses natural gas as both a fuel and a hydrogen source, producing a significant share of global industrial carbon emissions. Manthiram has been building an alternative: electrochemical pathways to ammonia that use renewable electricity as the energy source, running at room temperature and pressure. His specific advances in lithium-mediated ammonia synthesis and in oxygen-atom transfer catalysis have moved this from an interesting theoretical possibility toward an engineering reality. His work is relevant not just to ammonia but to a broader class of electrochemical routes to industrial chemicals that could reduce the chemical industry's carbon footprint substantially.

Note on the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar 2026
The RVP for 2026 had not been announced by the Government of India as of June 2026. The RVP 2025, announced in October 2025, remains the most recent government science award cycle covered in this article. Students should check the official PIB website for any subsequent announcement.

• SSC (CGL, CHSL, MTS): Three near-certain question types. First — who won the Infosys Prize 2025 in Life Sciences? Anjana Badrinarayanan (NCBS Bengaluru) — for DNA repair mechanisms. She is the only India-based winner in the 2025 batch. Second — who won in Physical Sciences? Karthish Manthiram (Caltech) — for sustainable electrochemical synthesis (ammonia without natural gas). Third — who won in Mathematical Sciences? Sabyasachi Mukherjee (TIFR Mumbai) — same researcher also received RVP Vigyan Yuva 2025.
• UPSC Prelims: Two angles. First, Sabyasachi Mukherjee's double recognition: Infosys Prize 2025 (Maths, announced Nov 12, 2025) and Vigyan Yuva-SSB (RVP 2025, announced Oct 26, 2025) — in the same year, for the same body of work. UPSC may test awareness of both awards and their separate identities. Second, Karthish Manthiram's work on electrochemical ammonia synthesis connects to UPSC's Green Chemistry and sustainable agriculture themes in GS3.
• Railway (NTPC, Group D): Ceremony date (10 January 2026, Bengaluru), prize amount (USD 100,000 per category), chief guest (Prof. Randy Schekman, 2013 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine). Anjana Badrinarayanan = only India-based winner. Sabyasachi Mukherjee = TIFR Mumbai winner.
• Banking (IBPS, SBI, RBI): Nikhil Agarwal (MIT) won Economics prize for market design — school choice, medical residency, kidney exchange mechanisms. This connects to Banking awareness topics on resource allocation and welfare economics. Sushant Sachdeva won Engineering prize for fast algorithms (University of Toronto). Andrew Ollett won Humanities prize for Prakrit languages scholarship.
• Common exam traps:
  1. The Infosys Prize 2025 was ANNOUNCED in November 2025 but the CEREMONY was 10 January 2026. Exam questions may use either year — read carefully which is being asked.
  2. Anjana Badrinarayanan is at NCBS Bengaluru — National Centre for Biological Sciences. Do not confuse this with IISER Pune (Siddhesh Kamat, 2024 winner) or IISc Bengaluru (different institution).
  3. Sabyasachi Mukherjee won BOTH Infosys Prize 2025 (private award) AND Vigyan Yuva-SSB under RVP 2025 (government award) in the same year. They are independent honours from different bodies.
  4. Karthish Manthiram's work is about making ammonia ELECTROCHEMICALLY (using renewable electricity) — not about traditional Haber-Bosch. The distinction matters for UPSC environment and chemistry questions.
  5. The RVP 2026 had NOT been announced as of June 2026. Do not assume a recipient for the government's 2026 Vigyan Ratna.