Professor Rajeeva L Karandikar is currently Chairperson of the National Statistics commission and Professor Emeritus at Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI).

Rajeeva obtained his Ph. D. at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), 1981 and was a Professor at ISI and Director at CMI, and for 4 years, he was Executive Vice President at Cranes Software International Limited, Bangalore.

Rajeeva has made significant contributions to various areas including Stochastic Calculus, Filtering theory, Markov processes and martingale problems, limit theorems, Monte Carlo techniques, queuing theory, game theory, theory of option pricing. He has authored three books, two Professor G Kallianpur and one with Professoe B V Rao. He is a fellow of Indian National Science Academy and Indian Academy of sciences, was awarded the young scientist medal by Indian National Science Academy (1985), S S Bhatnagar prize by Council of Industrial and scientific research (1999), C R Rao National award in statistics by Government of India (2000) and P C Mahalanobis Memorial Medal awarded by Indian National Science Congress.

Dr Karandikar has been involved in numerous consultancy projects over the years. He has worked on development of proprietary Blockcipher algorithms for Indian defense services. Dr Karandikar has been involved with opinion polls and exit polls in India since 1998. He has worked with India Today, Doordarshan, T V Today (Aaj Tak) during 1998-2005, CNN-IBN during 2005-2014, ABP News (2015-2019).