Indira Lara Chatterji (born 25 January 1973) is a Swiss-Indian mathematician working in France as a professor of mathematics in the J. A. Dieudonné Laboratory of theUniversity of Côte d'Azur. Her research involves low-dimensional geometry,cubical complexes, andgeometric group theory.[1] She has also studiedsexism andinstitutional bias in mathematics.[2][3]
Chatterji was born inLausanne,[4] where her father, Indianprobability theorist Srishti Dhar Chatterji, worked; her mother was a Swiss woman fromTicino, Carla Bolognini.[5] She is a Swiss citizen, and holdsOverseas Citizenship of India. After entering theUniversity of Lausanne intending to studycriminology and thensociology, she switched to mathematics,[6] earning alicense in 1995 and adiploma in 1997. She completed her doctorate in mathematics atETH Zurich in 2001.[4] Her dissertation,On property (RD) for certain discrete groups, studied the property of "rapid decay" ingroup theory, introduced byVincent Lafforgue in connection with theBaum–Connes conjecture.[7] It was jointly supervised by Marc Burger and Alain Valette.[8]
After working as an H. C. Wang Assistant Professor atCornell University, she took a tenure-track faculty position atOhio State University in 2005, and remained there until 2011, earning tenure in 2010. In 2007, she was one of 16 US mathematicians to win anNSF CAREER Award.[9] Meanwhile, in 2005, she began working as a professor at theUniversity of Orléans in France (on leave from Ohio State), and in 2010 was promoted toprofessor 1st class. In 2014 she moved to her present position in the J. A. Dieudonné Laboratory, originally associated with theUniversity of Nice Sophia Antipolis and currently with the University of Côte d'Azur.[4]
She also serves on the scientific council of theFondation sciences mathématiques de Paris [fr].[10]
Along with her mathematical research, Chatterji has made animated drawings that illustrate concepts in geometric group theory for general-audience talks, and exhibited her drawings in theInstitute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics "Illustrating Mathematics" program.[1]
Chatterji was a junior member of theInstitut Universitaire de France from 2014 to 2019.[4]
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