Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay (born 1968) is an Indian computer scientist specializing in computational biology. A professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, she is a Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize winner in Engineering Science for 2010 and an Infosys Prize 2017 laureate in the Engineering and Computer Science category. Her research is mainly in the areas of evolutionary computation, pattern recognition, machine learning and bioinformatics. Since 1 August 2015, she has been the Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, and she would oversee the functioning of all five centres of Indian Statistical Institute located at Kolkata, Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, and Tezpur besides several other Statistical Quality Control & Operation Research Units spread across India. She is the first woman Director of the Indian Statistical Institute. Currently she is on the Prime Ministers’ Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council.

Education and career

Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay obtained a bachelor of science in physics from Presidency College, Kolkata before obtaining another bachelor’s degree (of technology) in Computer Science in 1992 from Rajabazar Science College. She then obtained a master’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur before pursuing a Ph. D. at the Indian Statistical Institute, obtaining it in 1998.

Awards and honours

• Swarnajayanti Fellowship
• Humboldt Fellowship from Germany
• Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Science
• J. C. Bose Fellowship
• IEEE Fellow, 2016
• Infosys Prize 2017 in Engineering and Computer Science
• TWAS Prize for Engineering Sciences, by TWAS, The World Academy of Sciences 2018.