Meet Dr. Amitava "Babi" Mitra

NEET Founding Executive Director

Amitava "Babi" Mitra, Ph.D., is the Founding Executive Director of the NEET program at MIT, an initiative that has come a long way since its launch as a bold educational endeavor in 2017. He enjoys visioning, designing, setting up, and operationalizing innovative "start-up" educational initiatives and institutions and has over thirty years’ experience in institution and program building.

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Dr. Mitra has transformed a small e-learning R&D group into the profitable Knowledge Solutions Business at NIIT, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia, as its Senior Vice President. He is a Founding Member of the Board of Governors of an NGO, and the Pan Himalayan Grassroots Development Foundation in Kumaon, India, and was the Founding Dean of the School of Engineering & Technology at BML Munjal University (BMU), India. During 2013-2016, he launched "Joy of Engineering," a first-year hands-on course designed to get students engaged with engineering.
Dr. Mitra Mitra is on the Editorial Board of the European Journal of Engineering Education and is a Co-Editor of the Special Issue on Interdisciplinary Learning and Transforming Engineering Education in the European Journal of Engineering Education, which will be published in early 2025. He was also a guest Editor in the Advances in Engineering Education (AEE) Special Issue on Worldwide Leading Innovative Engineering Education Programs (Spring 2021, Vol. 9, Issue 3). He was a member of the Organizing Committee of the 9th International Research Symposium on PBL (IRSPBL23) “Transforming Engineering Education," convened jointly by MIT-NEET, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and the UNESCO Centre for PBL, Aalborg University, in the summer of 2023.