Umesh Mishra

Umesh K. Mishra is the Richard A. Auhll Dean of The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering, and the Donald W. Whittier Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. He received his B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, his M.S from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA., and his Ph.D. in 1984 from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He co-founded the first start-up in the world to commercialize RF GaN transistors and LEDs in 1996 (Nitres) which was acquired by CREE (now Wolfspeed) in 2000. Umesh co-founded Transphorm in 2007 to commercialize GaN transistors for power conversion which was acquired by Renesas in 2024. Umesh has advised 82 PhD theses to completion and his students are leaders in academia and industry. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, an International Fellow of the Japanese Society of Applied Physics, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and a Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Kanpur. He has received several awards for developing GaN electronics including the IEEE Jun-Ichi Nishizawa Medal in 2022.