YOUNG ALUMNUS/ALUMNA ACHIEVER AWARDEE 2026
Prof. Aaditya Ramdas is currently an Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Statistics and Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA.
After his B.Tech. from IIT Bombay, he earned a joint Ph.D. in Statistics and Machine Learning from CMU (2010–15) and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley (2015–18). He subsequently returned to CMU as a faculty member in 2018.
Prof. Ramdas had not come across much real machine learning or statistics during his time at IIT Bombay. His career, therefore, took a sharp turn at the start of his Ph.D. at CMU, where he had to quickly pick up two entirely new fields, progressing from the basics to research. For the first half of his Ph.D., he did very well in his coursework but struggled with research. Fortunately, things turned around in the second half, thanks to the guidance of his advisors, the support of wonderful collaborators, and his own love for writing and speaking.
In the decade since defending his dissertation, his research in statistics and machine learning has spanned many subfields. Over time, he discovered the areas he was most passionate about: post-selection inference and multiple testing, sequential experimentation and analysis, high-dimensional and nonparametric statistics, and uncertainty quantification in machine learning. Over the last eight years, he has graduated more than a dozen Ph.D. students and postdocs and has also engaged in numerous faculty collaborations, recently culminating in his first book — a 400-page introduction to hypothesis testing with e-values.
Prof. Ramdas has won several awards over the course of his illustrious career, including the Umesh K. Gavaskar Memorial Award for Best PhD Thesis (CMU); the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (US White House), the highest distinction bestowed by the US government to young scientists; the Kavli Fellowship, National Academy of Sciences; the Sloan Fellowship in Mathematics, Sloan Foundation; the CAREER Award, National Science Foundation; the Emerging Leader Award, Committee of the Presidents of Statistical Societies; the Peter Hall Early Career Prize, Institute of Mathematical Statistics; the Young Researcher Award, Bernoulli Society; the Statistician of the Year Award, American Statistical Association, Pittsburgh Chapter; election as Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics; and Faculty Research Awards from Google and Adobe.
Interests & Hobbies: At IITB, I participated in almost all inter-hostel or inter IIT sports, cult and tech competitions. After moving to the US, my hobbies changed drastically: the team sports I loved at IITB became less sustainable, and I took to running, biking, swimming, yoga, climbing, hiking, scuba diving, weightlifting, backpacking, etc.
A Personal Note: Life has had plenty of ups and downs, and lots of surprises. I often considered quitting my PhD halfway through, because I was not sure if I was cut out for research. A year after completing a full Ironman triathlon and being in my prime physically, a car slammed into me once when I was biking, and it took me over a year to fight back from the ICU and head to-toe injuries to then bike 545 miles through California from SF to LA to raise money for AIDS. That’s when I began living a trash-free life, ending after 7 years when my first daughter was born, and I discovered that fatherhood brought true love and joys like nothing else in life.
