Dr. Sunanda Mitra

Lubbock- Dr. Sunanda Mitra died peacefully in her apartment on August 9, 2020 in Lubbock, Texas. She was 84.

Dr. Mitra was born in 1936 in Brahmanbaria, Bangladesh (formerly East India) into a family with four older siblings. Her mother, of whom she often spoke with great admiration, served as a headmistress of a girl's school in Sunamganj before moving with Mitra to Kolkata, India in 1948. After her mother's passing when Mitra was 18 years of age, Mitra's brothers supported her educational pursuits, including her interest in physics, a nontraditional path for women at that time.

Dr. Mitra earned a B.S. (1955) and M.S. (1957) in Physics from Calcutta University. She married a classmate, Arun K. Mitra, and they both earned their doctorate degrees at Marburg University in Germany (1966). They moved to the United States in 1967. At Texas Tech University, Dr. Mitra was the first female professor in the College of Engineering, and she went on to become a Paul Whitfield Horn Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, an adjunct Professor in the Department of Radiology at the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center, Founder and Director of the Biomedical Integrated Devices and Systems (BIDS) Laboratory, and Director Emeritus of the Texas Tech Neuroimaging Institute (TTNI). Her research interests included image processing, pattern recognition, medical imaging, and image compression. She received research grants from federal agencies including NSF, NIH, NASA, and AFOSR, and industries, including Texas Instruments, LSI Logic, Modern Technology Corporation, and Northrop-Grumman. She supervised over 20 doctoral students and 60 master's degree students. Insatiably curious, at 82, Dr. Mitra developed and taught a class in deep learning algorithms.

Dr. Mitra was a devoted, beloved, and inspirational teacher, mentor, and advocate to all in her community, including students, faculty, staff, and a wide network of friends and family. She delighted in serving as an advisor, organizer, and supporter of events and initiatives across cultures and generations, weaving a beautiful web of people who might not have met otherwise. She was and remains a role model to her family and friends on how to remain resilient and optimistic in the midst of life's challenges, and how to find humor in adverse circumstances.

Dr. Mitra is survived by her daughter, Rita, her granddaughter and grandson-in-law, Danielle and Ethan, her brother and his wife, Karun and Pranati, and her nephews and niece-in-law, Anirban, Amlan, and Soma. She is preceded in death by her husband, Arun, her son, Atindra, two brothers, and a sister.

A remembrance ceremony for this wonderful lady will take place online on August 29, 2020. In lieu of flowers, donations to honor Dr. Mitra's life may be made to the Dr. Atindra Mitra Graduate Fellowship in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas Tech University, an endowment she established in honor of her late son to support graduate student research in engineering.

The family would like to thank so many for your dedication and love to our collective "mom", "grandmom", "aunt", and "sister". We are especially grateful to Dr. Brian Nutter and Ms. Inez Gonzalez for their many years of collaboration and support, and the staff at Covenant Medical and the Hospice of Lubbock for their compassionate care.