Raj Mittra


Raj Mittra is an electrical engineering professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he is the director of the Electromagnetic Communication Laboratory of the Electrical Engineering department. His specialty is electromagnetic communication.

Biography

Mittra was born in 1 July 1932, in India. In 1950, he graduated from Agra College, Uttar Pradesh, with a Bachelor of Science in physics, followed by a Master of Science in radio physics received in 1953 from the University of Calcutta in Kolkata, India and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1957 from the University of Toronto in Canada.

Professional career

In 1957 Mittra became a visiting assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Illinois. In 1961 he was promoted to associate professor, and in 1966 to full professor. At this time he also became the associate director of the Electromagnetics Laboratory. In 1984, he was named the director of its Electromagnetic Communication Laboratory, and continued to work at the University of Illinois until he retired in 1996.
After a short retirement, later in 1996 Mittra took a professor position at Penn State in the Electrical Engineering Department. He founded and was appointed as the director of its Electromagnetic Communication Laboratory. He still holds these positions in 2013.
He served a one-year term as president of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society from 1976 to 1977. He became president of RM Associates, a consulting firm, in 1980 and remains so in 2013. He was elected to the board of directors of the Electromagnetics Society in 1978. He was the editor for the Transactions Antennas and Propagation Society from 1980 to 1983 and International Journal of Electronics and Communications from 1975 to 2001.

Research and publications

Mittra's research interests include communication antenna design, computational electromagnetics, electromagnetic modeling and simulation of electronic packages, electromagnetic compatibility analysis, and radio scattering.

Books authored or co-authored

He has received the following awards: