Legal scholar Gautam Bhatia, five other academics win Infosys Prize 2026

Legal scholar and author Gautam Bhatia was among the six academics who were awarded the Infosys Prize 2026 announced on Thursday.

Bhatia is an adjunct professor at Jindal Global Law School in Haryana’s Sonipat and a Green Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He has authored five books.

“Bhatia has made significant contributions to the study of Indian constitutional law,” the Infosys Prize stated. “His work draws on legal thought, political theory and moral philosophy, with a focus on equality, fairness and building a more humane society.”

The Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Science was awarded to Swarun Kumar, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. He was recognised for his work that “extends low-power wireless networks beyond information delivery to perception and action in the physical world”, said the Infosys Science Foundation.

Isha Jain, an associate investigator at the Gladstone Institutes and assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, received the prize in life sciences.

She was awarded for work in “oxygen biology, which showed that tissue damage in some mitochondrial diseases arises from excess oxygen rather than energy failure, and for turning fundamental biochemical insights into new therapeutic strategies, including designing a small-molecule to reduce oxygen levels and vitamin-based treatments for inherited metabolic disorders”.

Riddhipratim Basu, an associate professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bengaluru, won the prize in mathematical sciences. Basu was recognised for his work in probability theory and statistical physics.

The prize in economics was awarded to Karthik Sastry, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. He was recognised for his “contributions to the field of climate change, and technological innovation, and to the study of business cycle fluctuations”.

Manoj Kumar Joshi, an assistant professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, won the prize in physical sciences. He was recognised for his work with “trapped ions, creating programmable quantum machines that reveal how complex quantum systems behave”.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Sneha.