Gautam Mitra

After gaining his PhD Gautam worked under Martin Beale, renowned optimisation specialist and director of Scientific Control Systems, and became a key member of the team developing optimisation solvers. After four more years in industry he joined Brunel University London as a lecturer. Subsequently, he rose to be the Head of Department of Mathematics. He founded CARISMA, a research centre in risk analysis and optimisation. Under his leadership the Mathematics department flourished, being rated second best research department in the London area; he retired in 2009.

Gautam Mitra is a research scientist in the field of Operational Research in general and computational optimization and modelling in particular. In 2004 he was awarded the title of ‘distinguished professor’ by Brunel University in recognition of his contributions in the domain of computational optimization, risk analytics and modelling. He headed the Mathematics Department (1990-2001) and subsequently founded the Center for the Analysis of Risk and Optimization Modelling Application (CARISMA). He is an emeritus Professor of Brunel University and a visiting professor of University College London. He has published five books and over hundred and fifty research articles.

After his PhD Gautam had to make a choice between academia and industry. He started in industry but in 1974 switched to academia and Joined Brunel University London and retired in 2009. The retirement gave him the chance to fulfil his ambition as an entrepreneur. The two companies UNICOM, a knowledge dissemination company and OptiRisk, an analytics company are academic spinoffs. Having left the academia, Gautam and his wife Dhira have devoted their energies to develop and grow these two companies.

After joining Presidency University, Kolkata in 1956 for intermediate science he made the choice of academic work and dropped competitive sports and hobby. This was the time in India when Engineering was seen to be the future pillar of the country. He had to make another choice between Science and Engineering, so he joined and graduated as an Electrical Engineer from Jadavpur University. The next choice for Post Graduate Studies was between Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Queen Mary University of London. As the tradition in the family was to travel to the UK rather than USA, in 1962 he joined Queen Mary University of London for an MPhil in Electrical Engineering. But attending a workshop in Mercury Auto (assembly) Code for numerical computation he was completely smitten by the new technology. To the disappointment of his QMC supervisor with whom he had written two papers and designed a measuring instrument he joined the newly formed Institute of Computer Science as a temporary programmer and then a research fellow gaining a PhD in 1968.