by Tomaso Poggio, MIT

It was with deep sadness that I learned the premature passing of Sayan Mukherjee in Leipzig, Germany on March 31st. Professor Sayan Mukherjee, born in India, completed his academic education at MIT in BCS in my CBCL group in 2001. Initially he remained there and at the nearby Broad Institute on a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellowship. From 2004 to 2022, he was at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, where he was promoted to Full Professor in 2015. In 2008, he received a Young Researcher Award from the International Indian Statistical Association, and in 2018, he became a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 2022, he joined Leipzig University as a Humboldt Professor and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences as a Fellow. Sayan was a great guy; he shaped the intellectual and social environment of my group for the few years he was around. Years ago I wrote this in my autobiography:

When Sayan Mukherjee appeared at the Center for Biological and Computational Learning (CBCL) for a summer job, he came with negative recommendations from his previous supervisor. He looked like a Tamil Tiger member. We had a thoughtful discussion with Federico Girosi on whether to take the calculated risk of accepting him. We did accept him. It was one of the best risks I have ever taken. Life was not easy with Sayan. He consistently rejected anything that was organized. As a graduate student in the department of brain and cognitive sciences, he refused to have anything to do with neuroscience. I tried to get him to work in computer vision but had to give up. As a last desperate attempt to get him working, I took him with me to see my old friend Jill Mezirov, then working with Eric Lander at the Whitehead on the Human Genome project. Sayan fell in love with genomics and statistics, and the rest is history. One of the best compliments I ever received was at Duke a few years ago to review one of their Departments, when some faculty members found out that I was Sayan’s advisor. They said, “You should send us many more guys like Sayan! He is fantastic!” Together with Gadi, Sayan created a special CBCL atmosphere that benefited other great students such as Shasha Rakhlin, Gene Yeo and Tony Ezzat. It was a combination of heavy-duty mathematics, even if not always correct, a deeply felt anti-Bayes attitude, and total disinterest in neuroscience.

We will miss him greatly.

For more about Sayan see https://math.duke.edu/news/duke-mourns-death-statistician-and-mathematic... and 

https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/en/explore/newsroom/dossier-alexander....