Prof. Vishal Misra
B.Tech., 1992, Electrical Engineering

Prof. Vishal Misra is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CS and EE) at Columbia University and a Visiting Scientist at Google. He obtained his B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1992, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Umass Amherst in 1996 and 2000, respectively.

After completing his Ph.D., Prof. Misra joined the Computer Science Department at Columbia University in 2001, and is a (full) Professor of CS and EE. He also co-founded (ESPN) Cricinfo as a graduate student in the early 90s. In 2011, Prof. Misra founded a data center company called Infinio, and have held visiting professorships at INRIA (Sophia Antipolis, 2009), Technicolor (Paris, 2009), Telefonica (Barcelona, 2009) and Google (2017-18). He continues as a visiting scientist at Google.

Prof. Misra’s area of research is networking. As part of his Ph.D. thesis, he developed a stochastic differential equation model for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which has been foundational for a lot of follow on research and has made a lot of practical impact from the Internet to data centers. Some of his work of creating a congestion control mechanism is based on that model has become part of the Internet standard and runs on every cable modem in the world. Prof. Misra was led to work on Internet Economics by one of his Ph.D. student, with whom he formally started studying issues like Network Neutrality very early on. Prof. Misra plays an active part in the Network Neutrality debate in India, working with the government, regulators and citizen’s activists and India now has the strongest pro consumer regulations anywhere in the world, which mirror the definition he proposed of Network Neutrality.

Prof. Misra is a Fellow of ACM (2018), Fellow of IEEE (2016), Outstanding Young Alumni, UMass-Amherst College of Engineering (2014). Prof. Misra is a recipient of NSF Career Award, DoE Career Award, IBM Faculty Award (twice), and Google Faculty Award (twice).

Special Memories

"Wing mates, hostel life. Friends from my IIT days have stayed with me till date. I was heavily into sports and cultural activities during my days here and Mood Indigo was a big part of my life. Playing cricket for IIT (once against Naseeruddin Shah, Abhinav Chaturvedi and Tom Alter!) is a fond memory and so is Inter-IIT Camp. PAFs, Interhostel sports events participating and cheering – those were some of the best days of my life. Four of my teachers in the department deserve a mention for influencing my way of thinking and career path – Prof. UB Desai, Prof. PG Poonacha, Prof. SC Sahasrabudhe and Prof. Shiv Shankar".