Faculty

Amitava ‘Babi’ Mitra, Ph.D. is the founding executive director, New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, a certificate program launched in 2017 to reimagine undergraduate engineering education at MIT. He is enthusiastic about implementing transformative ‘start-up’ educational endeavors that engage students; he enjoys visioning, formulating, designing, and planning the implementation, and then taking it through to fruition. These include setting up and running educational initiatives within established cultures (as in his current role at MIT, USA) or at start-ups (as founding dean, School of Engineering & Technology, BML Munjal University (BMU), Gurgaon, India). He has over thirty years of experience in institution building, higher education, corporate e-learning, and distance education. He transformed a small e-learning R&D group into the profitable Knowledge Solutions Business at NIIT, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia, USA as its senior vice-president. He is a founding member, Board of Governors of an NGO, Pan Himalayan Grassroots Development Foundation, Kumaon, India and as the founding dean, school of engineering & technology, BML Munjal University, India during 2013-16 he launched ‘Joy of Engineering’, a first-year hands-on course designed to get students engaged with engineering. Mitra is regularly invited to deliver keynote addresses and be a panellist at global conferences focusing on engineering education, and has widely presented at the annual conferences of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). He was a guest editor, Advances in Engineering Education(AEE) Special Issue on Worldwide Leading Innovative Engineering Education Programs, Spring 2021, Vol 9, Issue 3, August 2021, https://advances.asee.org.
Mitra was born in New York City and grew up in India. He enjoys food, music, the intersects across people and technology, travel, growing up with his children and playing squash.