Prof. Chandrashekhar Khare was born in Mumbai, and studied at Cambridge, Oxford and Caltech, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1995. He worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the University of Utah and is now a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prof. Khare’s research is in number theory, especially on the relation between modular forms and Galois representations that underpins Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. In 2008, he and Jean-Pierre Winterberger made a remarkable breakthrough with their proof of a celebrated conjecture of J.P. Serre. Prof. Prof. Khare’s honors and awards include the Humboldt Research Award (2011), Cole Prize (2011), Infosys Prize (2010), the Guggenheim fellowship (2008), Fermat Prize (2007), and the INSA Young Scientist Award (1999). In 2012, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK).