Two distinguished professors from UC Santa Barbara’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Umesh Mishra and Sanjit Mitra, have received prestigious honors from their peers overseas. 

Mishra was elected as a Foreign Fellow to the Indian National Academy of Engineering, an honor bestowed on foreign nationals who have made outstanding contributions in engineering and technology, maintained consistent professional relationships with India, and emerged as global leaders based on their most distinguished accomplishments. 

Mishra’s research is focused primarily on the development of gallium nitride (GaN) materials and devices for electronics. He also contributes to optoelectronics by working on the electronic properties of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and micro-LEDs. Already an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Misha is also a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the National Academy of Inventors. Last year, he received the Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal, one of the IEEE’s most prestigious honors, in recognition of his contributions to the development of gallium-nitride-based electronics.

Sanjit Mitra, a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor, was recently elected to the Engineering Academy of Japan (EAJ) as an international fellow for his contributions to signal processing. The EAJ is composed of leading experts from academia, industry, and government institutions who have made outstanding contributions in engineering and technological sciences. Since its establishment in 1987, the EAJ has grown to include more than eight hundred individual Japanese members and twenty-seven foreign associates. Mitra was also just elected as a member of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences, a society with more than two thousand members. 

Mitra is already an elected member of the NAE, as well as a foreign fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. He is a fellow of the IEEE, the American Association for Advancement of Science, and the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. During his long academic career, Mitra has graduated more than forty master’s students and fifty PhD students, held visiting appointments at sixteen institutions in twelve countries, and presented more than thirty keynote or plenary lectures at international conferences in eighteen countries.