Debasis Mitra joined Columbia University as Professor of Electrical Engineering in 2013. Prior to joining Columbia he worked at Bell Labs for 44 years.

His current research interests are in the scientific foundations of policy that impact engineers and engineering systems, especially in models, analyses and syntheses of organizational and individual interactions. Instances are network neutrality, network economics, and the science and management of innovations and knowledge-creation. In the recent past his research has been in traffic engineering of communication networks, cooperative inter-networking, planning for network infrastructure and network resource sharing.

Debasis Mitra served as Vice President of the Mathematical and Algorithmic Sciences Research Center in Bell Labs during 1999-2007. He directed work in fundamental mathematics, algorithms, complex systems analysis and optimization, statistics, information & communication sciences and operations research. During 2008-2013 he served as Vice President, Chief Scientist’s Office, Bell Labs, and had responsibility for global research partnerships, academic relations and technical excellence.

Debasis Mitra is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Bell Labs Fellow and a Life Fellow of the IEEE. He is a recipient of the 2012 ACM SIGMETRICS Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2012 Arne Jensen Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Teletraffic Congress, 1998 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award, the 1993 Steven O. Rice Prize Paper Award and the 1982 Guillemin-Cauer Prize Paper Award of the IEEE, among other awards.

Debasis Mitra has been on the editorial boards of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, the IEEE Transactions of Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Queueing Systems (QUESTA) and Operations Research. He is author of over 100 journal publications and holds over 20 patents.

He has served as member, National Academies Panel on Information Sciences (and its predecessors) at the Army Research Laboratory during 2009-2015. In 2011-2012 he chaired the panel and served on the Army Research Laboratory Technical Assessment Board. In 2009-2010 he served on the panel to assess the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Information Technology Laboratory. During 2006-2010 he served on the Air Force Studies Board of the National Academies. In 2003 he served as Chair of the Telecom review panel of the N.J. Commission on Jobs Growth and Economic Development. He has served on the Review Panel of the Institute of Infocomm Research in Singapore, the Advisory Committee to CEET in the University of Melbourne, the IEEE COMSOC Awards Committee and chaired the IEEE Eric Sumner Award Committee during 2004-2005.