Asit Kumar Datta is a former professor and ex-head of the Department of Applied Physics and later of the Department of Applied Optics and Photonics, University of Calcutta. He received his Ph.D. in power electronics from the University of Calcutta, and started his career at the same university as a lecturer. In 1989, he was appointed professor of the same department and later moved to the newly created department of Applied Optics and Photonics. Professor Datta has contributed significantly to the area of power electronics, control instrumentation, photonics, and optical computing. He executed 12 funded and sponsored research projects and has published more than 120 papers in national and international journals and conference proceedings, and he has also guided 14 research students towards their Ph.D. degrees. Professor Datta is a fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers, the Optical Society of India, and the Indian Society of Lighting Engineers. He represented India at the International Commission for Optics (ICO), Paris and was the Indian representative in two divisions of the International Commission of Illumination (CIE), Geneva. Soumika Munshi received her M.Sc. (Tech.) degree followed by a Ph.D. in Applied Physics with a specialization in Optics and Optoelectronics from the University of Calcutta in 1996 and 2003, respectively. She joined as a scientist at the Instrument Research and Development Establishment (IRDE), Dehradun, a laboratory of the Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO), under the Government of India's Ministry of Defence, in 2004. She is now associated with DRDO headquarters in New Delhi, and worked in between at the Defence Research and Development Laboratory, Hyderabad. Her areas of interest include: image processing, photonic computing, lasers, and photonic instrumentation. She has published and presented more than 30 papers in international and national journals and at conference proceedings.
