Palash Sarkar
About
Palash received his Bachelor of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering degree from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, in 1991, and Master of Technology in Computer Science degree from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India, in 1993. He completed his PhD from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India in 1999 after which he worked as a postdoctoral fellow for a year at the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research (CACR), University of Waterloo, Canada. Since June 2005, he has been a Professor at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) and a Professor on a Higher Administrative Grade since 2011.
He is one of the first academics to start research on Cryptology in India and has since then pioneered the field in the country. His academic leadership has inspired and supervised many doctoral and post-doctoral students in Cryptology who have evolved to become internationally renowned cryptologists, professors and established academics at the top-most academic institutes in India, namely the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore), the Indian Statistical Institute (Kolkata), the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur), et cetera. Palash (and his collaborators) have provided state-of-the-art solutions for several important cryptographic functionalities. In recognition of his scientific achievements, he was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Mathematical Sciences in the year 2011. It is the highest academic award bestowed by the Government of India and also one of the top civilian awards of the country.
More details about Palash can be found on his webpage at the ISI.
Research interests
The primary research interest of Palash is Cryptology. More generally, he is interested in topics at the intersection of Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics. He has been working on several theoretical and implementation aspects of Cryptology with formidable depth and breadth.
Professional
Palash has co-authored three books on sparsely related topics. The first book is on Identity-Based Encryption; the second book is on Cooperative Game Theory; the third book is on Algorithmic Finance, Algorithmic Trading and Blockchain. He was the program co-Chair of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) flagship conference Asiacrypt for the years 2013 and 2014.