Partha Mitra

Partha Mitra is one of the brightest stars in Bell Labs and a
thinker of international repute. Mitra graduated in physics from Presidency
College and did his PhD in Physics from Harvard University. He has been awarded
seven patents, received a number of grants, and faculty research appointments at
Princeton University, New York University Medical School, and the California
Institute of Technology.

His greatest achievement includes leading a team at Bell Labs
to answer how much information can be theoretically transmitted over a single
strand of fiber. According to the team's findings, it is theoretically
possible to send 100 terabits of information per second on a single strand of
fiber, an equivalent of nearly 2 bn telephones calls. He has also co-authored
numerous research papers in Nature, Science, and other leading journals, on
topics as wide as optical and wireless communication, speech recognition, and
neural biology

At the same time Mitra was working on the optical-capacity
problem, he was collaborating with another Bell Labs scientist, Michael Andrews,
and Rob de Carvalho, a Harvard researcher, on an invention that triples the
capacity of wireless communication.