Prof. Chandrashekhar Khare was born in Mumbai, and after finishing his higher secondary education there, studied for the Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge. After a year of study at Oxford, he moved to Caltech and obtained his Ph.D. in 1995. He returned to India to work for almost a decade at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. He moved thereafter to the University of Utah and has been at the University of California at Los Angeles since 2007.

He is a number theorist and works on the connection between modular forms and Galois representations (such a connection plays a key role in Wiles's solution of Fermat's Last Theorem). Prof. Khare's work with Jean-Pierre Wintenberger gave proof of a celebrated conjecture of J.-P. Serre in the subject. The conjecture had motivated much work in this central area of number theory and had remained unresolved for more than three decades after it was first formulated.

Prof. Khare has received several honors and awards in recognition of his work. He received the Humboldt Research Award in 2011, Cole Prize in 2011, Infosys Prize in 2010, Guggenheim fellowship in 2008, Fermat prize in 2007, and the INSA Young Scientist Award in 1999. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Hyderabad in August 2010. In 2012, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.