Saugata Basu received his PhD in 1996 from the Courant Institute, NYU, under the guidance of Richard Pollack. Subsequently, he held postdoctoral positions at MSRI, Berkeley and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Currently he is a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Purdue University.  He was previously a faculty member in the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech. His main research interest is in the area of real algebraic geometry, especially quantitative and algorithmic aspects, and its applications in computational complexity theory within the Blum-Shub-Smale framework. He co-authored (with Marie-Francoise Roy and Richard Pollack) the book Algorithms in Real Algebraic Geometry that appeared in 2003. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award (2002), and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in Mathematics (2003).