20 Most Prominent Analytics & Data Science Academicians In India: 2018

While talent gap is a commonly-discussed challenge in the analytics industry, there are many institutes and academicians who are working tirelessly in making professionals and students industry-ready. Analytics India Magazine has compiled a list of 20 most prominent academicians in the industry who have contributed immensely in the analytics, artificial intelligence and data science education sector. The list has a mix of names from the academics, industry, PhDs, non-PhDs, part-time faculties and others, who are contributing towards enriching the analytics and data science sector.

The academicians are listed in alphabetical order. 

Read our earlier list here.

1| Abhinav Srivastava

Abhinav Srivastava comes with an extensive experience of working as a data analytics manager in multiple domains. With an integrated MSc course in Statistics and Informatics from IIT Kharagpur, has worked with analytics programming languages and dashboards such as Python, SAS, R, SQL, SPSS, Tableau and IMAKE, among others. He has worked with noted industry names such as Deutsche Bank, SCIO Health Analytics, Karvy Analytics and TCS, among others.

Noteworthy achievements by Abhinav Srivastava:

• Current Academic Position: Professor, IMS Proschool
• Prominent Credentials: Cleared CFA, felicitated with NCFM certificate (NSE, India) in Derivative Market Dealers Module, recipient of DAAD scholarship, (German Academic Exchange Service)
• Research Interests: Fraud analytics, healthcare analytics, stock market, churn analysis using machine learning. He had a white paper published on predictive analytics in IoT.

2| Arnab Laha

Arnab Laha has keen interest in understanding how analytics, ML and AI can be leveraged to solve complex problems of business and society. He has been featured in this list by AIM in 2014 and 2017. Prof. Laha is a firm believer in new tech and has affirmed that their rapid adoption would enable developing countries to solve challenges like poverty, malnutrition, providing quality and affordable healthcare, improving education and imparting skills, reducing crime etc.

Noteworthy achievements by Arnab Laha:

• Current Academic Position: Professor Production and Quantitative Methods (P&QM), Indian Institute Of  Management, Ahmedabad
• Prominent Credentials: He is currently a member of Governing Council of Insurance Information Bureau of India, member of the FICCI Healthcare Committee, Associate Editor of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining: The ASA Data Science Journal. He has authored a book on analytics How to Make the Right Decision, and is the editor of upcoming book volume Advances in Analytics and Applications to be published by Springer.
• Research Interest: He has published more than 25 papers in national and international reputed journals and has presented papers in more than 50 conferences held in India and abroad. His areas of research and teaching interest include advanced data analytics, quality management and risk modeling.
• Teaching Experience: He has been teaching analytics for about two decades, of which the last 15 years were at IIM Ahmedabad.
• PhD: He has PhD in Statistics from Indian Statistical Institute.

3| Arun Reddy

Arun Reddy is the senior faculty of data science at UpX Academy. He holds an MS from University of Cologne and an MBA from Darmstadt University, Germany. He now leads new product development in data science. He also has industry experience where he has been the project manager, product development consultant in companies like Tech Mahindra.

Noteworthy achievements by Arun Reddy:

• Current Academic Position: Product Manager, UpX Academy
• Prominent Credentials: Developing University collaborations (Top 100 ranking universities) in the US and EU, manage big data analytics and ML freelancing instructors hiring from leading companies involved in digital sales.

4| Bappaditya Mukhopadhyay

With an MA in Economics from Delhi School of Economics and PhD from ISI, Dr Mukhopadhyay is currently the professor and chairperson of the PGPBA program at Great Lakes Institute of Management. He is also the visiting professor of University of Ulm, Germany, and distinguished Professorial Associate, Decision Sciences and Modelling Program, Victoria University, Australia. He areas of interest and expertise include applied economic theory, game theory, analytics, statistics, econometrics, derivatives and financial risk management, survey design, execution, and others.

Noteworthy achievements by Bappaditya Mukhopadhyay:

• Current Academic Position: Professor of Finance at Great Lakes Institute of Management
• Prominent Credentials: He has various research papers published in national as well as international journals. He is currently working on a book titled Measuring and Managing Credit Risk. He has been the Managing Editor at Journal of Emerging Market Finance and Journal of Infrastructure and Development, member of Index Committee, member of Research Advisory Committee, Research Advisory Committee, NICR, Expert member in Faculty Selection committees at various Business schools, among others.
• Research Interest: Information economics and contract theory, financial risk management, credit risk and agency theory, microfinance institutions, financial Inclusion, analytics in public policy
• Teaching Experience: He has more than 20 years of teaching experience in economics, finance.

5| Chandrashekar Ramanathan

Professor Chandrashekar Ramanathan is a faculty member at IIIT-B since 2007. His primary focus area is software engineering, application development and databases. He has over 10 years of work experience in extensive application software development in large MNCs. His current focus is in the area of semi-structured databases and software engineering. Application architectures, enterprise content management and knowledge management are his other areas of interest.​

Noteworthy achievements by Chandrasekhar Ramanathan:

• Current Academic Position: Professor and Dean (Academics), IIIT-B and UpGrad
• Research Interest: Data sciences, software architecture and technology for education, semi-structured databases, software engineering, enterprise content management and knowledge management
• Teaching Experience: Over 20 years
• PhD: PhD from Mississippi State University

6| Dr Dakshinamurthy V Kolluru

One of India’s biggest names in AI, Dr Kolluru is sought after globally for his in-depth knowledge and expertise in analytics. His significant contribution in the areas of analytics training, consulting and research has received immense applause from several fortune companies around the globe. He is the founder, president and chief mentor of INSOFE. He has also worked as a scientist with Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratories, India and has been the Chief Research Officer with Prithvi Information Solutions, India.

Noteworthy achievements by Dr. Dakshinamurthy V Kolluru:

• Current Academic Position: Founder President and Chief Mentor, INSOFE
• Prominent Credentials: Binani Gold Medal for work under guidance of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam to indigenously develop Radome, a critical component for Agni Missile (ICBM), Recognised as one among the top 10 most prominent Analytics Academicians in India by AIM.
• Research Interest: ML, optimisation, artificial neural networks, deep learning, text mining, mathematical algorithms, and pattern extraction
• PhD: PhD in Material Science and Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University

7| Dipyaman Sanyal

Dipyaman Sanyal is the program director for the PG Program in Data Science and Machine Learning (PGPDM) offered jointly by the University of Chicago, IBM and Jigsaw Academy. Sanyal is the only academic to have led three top-ranked analytics programs in India — UChicago-IBM-Jigsaw, Northwestern-Bridge and IMT, Ghaziabad. While his research interest lies in fairly quantitative topics like decision science, bounded rationality and econophysics, he loves to simplify analytics teaching and has done so for dozens of corporations and the hundreds of students he has taught analytics. He has over 15 years of industry experience where he has worked for and consulted for world leading private equity and hedge funds, market research and consulting firms, traditional industries, non-profits and government agencies.

Noteworthy achievements by Dipyaman Sanyal:

• Current Academic Position: Faculty and Program Director, Jigsaw Academy
• Prominent Credentials: Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Charter Holder. Founder of dōnō consulting, a consultant data scientist to National Skill Development Corporation, co-founder of gharvalue.com and adjunct faculty at Northwestern University, Chicago for their MS in Data Science.
• Research Interest: Decision Science, Econophysics, Behavioral Economics
• Teaching Experience: Over six years
• PhD: PhD Candidate for Economics at Center for Economic Studies and Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University

8| Dinesh Kumar

U Dinesh Kumar is a professor of Decision Sciences and Information Systems at IIM Bangalore and introduced Business Analytics elective course in 2008 to the PGP students at IIM Bangalore. He has worked with several reputed institutes across the world including Stevens Institute of Technology, US; University of Exeter, UK; University of Toronto, Canada; Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland; Queensland University of Technology, Australia; Australian National University, Australia and the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. He has published more than 60 research articles in leading academic journals. He conducts corporate training programme in analytics that has helped more than 1,000 professionals.

Noteworthy achievements by Dinesh Kumar:

• Current Academic Position: Professor, Decision Sciences and Information Systems,  IIM Bangalore
• Prominent Credentials: Authored a book titled, Business Analytics the Science of Data Driven Decision Making, has written more than 30 case studies on application of analytics by Indian MNCs. He is the governing council member of the Karnataka Government’s Centre of excellence for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence set up in Collaboration with NASSCOM. He has also developed analytics-based credit scoring system for rural bank funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
• Research Interest: Business analytics and big data, ML, deep learning algorithms, stochastic models (Reinforcement Learning Algorithms), optimisation, multi criteria decision making, six sigma, maintainability and maintenance, integrated logistic support and performance based logistics.
• Teaching Experience: He has been teaching analytics since 2008. He also started one of the oldest certificate programs in analytics in 2010 and introduced certificate program in big data analytics in 2015. He has also conducted training program on analytics for companies such as Accenture, Aditya Birla Group, Ashok Leyland, Bank of America, Blue Ocean Market Intelligence, Cisco and Fidelity.
• PhD: PhD in Mathematics from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

9| G Srinivasaraghavan

He has over 18 years of industry experience and is currently a partner at Performance Engineering Associates. He has also worked with Infosys and Aztecsoft before. At Infosys, he was responsible for the delivery of large, performance-critical IT systems for Fortune 500 clients in the telecom, BFSI and logistics spaces. In his previous position he was CTO at Aztecsoft Ltd (now a part of Mindtree Ltd.), where he brought about a radical, product-quality-focussed shift in the firm’s approach to quality assessment.​

Noteworthy achievements by G Srinivasaraghavan:

• Current Academic Position: Professor and Faculty-in-charge, IIIT-B and UpGrad
• Prominent Credentials- He has over a dozen published papers in several reputed international fora, including Journal of Algorithms, International Journal on Computational Geometry and Applications and Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science.
• Research Interest: Machine learning, optimisation, computational intelligence, algorithms and complexity
• Teaching Experience: He has been a guest faculty at IIIT Bangalore since 2011
• PhD: PhD from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

10| Gaurav Vohra

He has over 18 years of experience in the field of analytics and has worked across multiple verticals including financial services, retail, FMCG, telecom, pharmaceuticals, and leisure industries. In his time as an academician, his focus has been on conveying the significance of analytics and related practices to a wider audience. He has created courses on analytics that have been taken by over 15,000 students across 20 countries. 

Vohra holds an MBA from the prestigious IIM Bangalore and started his career in analytics with Capital One. He has worked with the likes of C Penney, Gap, Walmart, IRI, 7-11, IMS health, and ICICI Lombard. He has also spoken at prestigious institutes such as IIM Bangalore, IIM Lucknow, IIM Udaipur, Great Lakes, and many more. He founded Jigsaw Academy in 2011 as an avenue to meet the growing demand for talent in the field of analytics by providing industry-relevant training and education to develop business-ready professionals.

Noteworthy achievements by Gaurav Vohra:

• Current Academic Position: CEO and co-founder, Jigsaw Academy
• Research Interest: The impact on learning outcomes with the advent of analytics
• Teaching Experience: Over 10 years

11| Manvender Singh

Manvender Singh is the founder and CEO of UpX Academy and founded it in 2016. He has an MBA from ISB, Hyderabad, and was awarded the prestigious ISB Torchbearer award. He has a Bachelor’s degree from NIT, Jamshedpur. Manvender’s core focus areas is helping professionals and organisations to understand how to leverage new tech to deliver business results.

Noteworthy achievements by Manvender Singh:

• Current Academic Position: Founder and CEO, UpX Academy
• Prominent Credentials: Founder and CEO of UpX Academy, co-founder Aristotle Prep, the first test prep brand out of India to have a global customer base with customers in 60+ countries, awarded the ISB Torchbearer Award.
• Area Of Interest: Entrepreneurship, consumer internet, e-commerce, technology and education. His strengths are around new venture creation, B2C product strategy, product development and customer acquisition, deal-making and negotiations.
• Teaching Experience: Over three years

12| PK Viswanathan

With a rich and varied experience across academia, research, industry, training and consulting, Dr PK Viswanathan, currently serves as a professor of analytics at Great Lakes Institute of Management. He teaches subjects such as business statistics, operations research, business analytics, predictive analytics, ML analytics, spreadsheet modelling and others. In the industrial tenure spanning over 15 years, he has held senior management positions in Ballarpur Industries (BILT) of the Thapar Group and the JK Industries of the JK Organisation. Apart from executing corporate consultancy assignments, Dr PK Viswanathan has also designed and conducted training programs for many leading organisations in India. He has degrees in MSc (Madras), MBA (FMS, Delhi), MS (Manitoba, Canada), PhD (Madras).

Noteworthy achievements by P.K Viswanathan:

• Current Academic Position: Professor of Analytics, Great Lakes Institute of Management
• Prominent Credentials: He has authored a total of four books, three of which are on Business Statistics and one on Marketing Research published by the British Open University Business School, UK.
• Research Interest: AI, ML, analytics
• Patents: He has original research publications exclusively on analytics where he has developed modelling and demonstrated their decision support capabilities. These are: Modelling Credit Default in Microfinance — An Indian Case Study, PK Viswanathan, SK Shanthi, Modelling Asset Allocation and Liability Composition for Indian Banks
• Teaching Experience: He has been teaching analytics for more than two decades but has been into active and intense teaching since analytics started witnessing a meteoric growth with the advent of R and Python.
• PhD: PhD in the application of Operations Research from Madras University

13| Prateek Agrawal

Prateek Agrawal is the ex-management consultant with Big five consulting firm. He comes with an industry experience of 12 years in areas like finance, hospitality, technology and others. With an MS in Info Systems and Operational Research (Texas), he has trained more than 5,000 professionals. An entrepreneur and investor, he has a keen interest in new business models where technology and data science plays a key role. He specialises in areas such as branding, identity, go-to market strategies, e-business models, among others.

Noteworthy achievements by Prateek Agrawal:

• Current Academic Position: Director, Ivy Professional School
• Research Interest: Big data analytics, e-business models
• Teaching Experience: More than 12 years

14| Dr Prithwis Mukerjee

With a BTech from IIT Kharagpur, MS and PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas, he has two decades of experience in IT, software and management consultancy businesses. He has worked with the likes of Tata Steel, Tata IBM and PwC. He has also been a full-time tenured professor at the Vinod Gupta School of Management. He pioneered the skills of RDBMS in Tata Steel, eBusiness and web-based technology at PwC, 3D virtual worlds at IBM and others.

Noteworthy achievements by Dr Prithwis Mukerjee:

• Current Academic Position: Program Director for the Business Analytics Programs at Praxis Business School
• Prominent Credentials: He has designed a unique curriculum for Praxis which stands on the three pillars of data science — maths, statistics and machine learning. It revolves around areas like R, Python, big data, NoSQL and functional domains such as marketing, finance and telecom. He also writes for a monthly technology-oriented column in Swarajya.
• Teaching Experience: He has more than 12 years of teaching experience
• PhD: PhD from The University of Texas at Dallas

15| RL Shankar

RL Shankar is a professor of finance and analytics with over ten years of experience teaching MBA students, PhD scholars and working executives. He has BTech from IIT Madras, MS in computational finance from Carnegie Mellon University, US, PhD in Finance, EdHEC (Singapore), and has trained over 2,000 executives from prestigious firms. With multiple research papers published under his name, he recently received a research grant from NYU Stern School of Business and NSE for original research on Low latency trading and co-movement of asset prices.

Noteworthy achievements by RL Shankar:

• Current Academic Position: Professor of Finance and Analytics, Great Lakes Institute of Management
• Prominent Credentials: He has been a visiting professor at IIM Kozhikode, IIM Trichy and IIM Ranchi. He is also a TEDx speaker.   
• Research Interest: Algorithmic trading, market microstructure, imperfections in derivatives markets and non-parametric risk measurement techniques
• Teaching Experience: More than 15 years
• PhD: PhD in Finance from EdHEC (Singapore)

16| Dr Ramesh Babu

With over 22 years of professional IT industry experience, in the role of senior leadership in global organisations, Dr Babu has been responsible for profitable growth in the data Science and digital products. He drives enterprise-wide capacity and capabilities programs, by leveraging technology, in the areas of data science and analytics, competency development, learning and assessments domain, applied research, and consulting. He has delivered solutions to clients in areas such as manufacturing, banking, insurance, financial services, and others.

Noteworthy achievements by Dr Ramesh Babu:

• Current Academic Position: Director and Head, Data Science and Digital Products at Manipal Prolearn
• Prominent Credentials: He is the director and head of data science and digital products at Manipal Prolearn and has 15 publications, both national and international, to his credits. He is also an international jury member of Corporate University Exchange awards and co-opted Member of IIIT Taskforce Chaired by Mohandas Pai.
• Research Interest: AI applications in business, higher education models, learning analytics
• Teaching Experience: More than 20 years.
• PhD: PhD from IIT Bombay in Computer Science and Engineering

17| Dr Reena Duggal

A visiting faculty at Ivy Professional School, Dr Duggal has 14 years of experience in the industry. An ex-Oracle consultant, she is an Oracle and Cognos certified professional with extensive industry experience of over 12 years working for international corporations in business intelligence domain. She has an expertise in areas such as statistical modelling, data mining techniques, and applying it in noisy, complex real-world data to identify business insights, especially in healthcare industry.

Noteworthy achievements by Dr Reena Duggal:

• Current Academic Position: Visiting faculty, Ivy Professional School
• Research Interest: Machine learning, text analytics, statistical analysis methods such as classification, association rules, regression, statistical inference, and validation methods
• PhD: She holds PhD in Information Technology

18| Dr Soumyakanti Chakraborty

With a BTech from Calcutta University and a fellow of IIM Calcutta, Dr Soumyakanti Chakraborty joined XLRI Information Systems Area in 2009. With a strong teaching experience in areas such as business modelling, strategies of information and network industries, he has provided corporate training to reputed organisations such as Viacom18, Madura Fabrics Limited, NHPC, NADP, WBSEDCL and others.

Noteworthy achievements by Dr Soumyakanti Chakraborty:

• Current Academic Position: Lecturer for XLRI’s Data Science Online Certification Program in collaboration with Talentedge.
• Research Interest:  economics of information industries, cloud pricing, two-sided platform businesses, combinatorial auctions, and algorithms.
• Teaching Experience: More than 20 years

19| Dr Subhabaha Pal

Dr Subhabaha Pal is a prominent academician and researcher in the field of analytics and data science, with books and research paper publications on the real-life data analysis of financial, insurance, stock-market and biological data in prominent journals. He currently teaches statistics, advanced machine learning, marketing analytics, SAS programming and application in business analytics in his current role at Manipal ProLearn.

Noteworthy achievements by Subabahah Pal:

• Current Academic Position: Senior Faculty, Data Science and Machine Learning, Manipal Global Data Academy of Data Science
• Prominent Credentials: Published 32 research papers in national and international refereed indexed journals, three book publications- two on statistics and one on quantitative techniques in project management. He also has 14+ years of freelance research experience in real-life data analytics. He has received the honour as the most supportive university mentor from the data science society, Sofia, Bulgaria.
• Research Interest: Time-series forecasting, ML, marketing analytics, experimental designs
• Teaching Experience: Over six years.
• PhD: PhD from University of Calcutta in non-life insurance analytics (management and commerce)

20| Suchit Majumdar

He is the chief data science evangelist at UpX Academy and an expert in data science and big data technologies. With an MBA from Indian School of Business, he has worked extensively for major companies, including investment banks. He has been a key driver of the Phase-I implementation of Smart City Projects by Andhra Pradesh government wherein he was driving surveillance and analytics implementation. Apart from teaching professionals data science, Majumdar regularly speaks at prestigious events. Over the last two years, his focus is on using data science and ML for automation and optimisation, and helping professionals and organisations get prepared for AI revolution.

Noteworthy achievements by Suchit Majumdar:

• Current Academic Position: Chief data science evangelist at UpX Academy
• Prominent Credentials: He is currently building products in the field of data science, business analytics, Tech-Ed and assisting top management in using advanced analytics to build core strategies around data. Coached more than 4,000 professionals in the space of Statistics, Analytics and Machine Learning.
• Research Interest: Product Analytics, data science, machine learning, business strategy, smart city, IoT, e-Learning, remote monitoring, e-surveillance, command Centers, product strategy, technology strategy, and others.