[1] In 1950, he graduated from Agra College, Uttar Pradesh, with a Bachelor of Science in physics,[4] followed by a Master of Science in radio physics received in 1953 from the University of Calcutta in Kolkata, India[4] and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1957 from the University of Toronto in Canada.
In 1984, he was named the director of its Electromagnetic Communication Laboratory, and continued to work at the University of Illinois until he retired in 1996.
[4] After a short retirement, later in 1996 Mittra took a professor position at Penn State in the Electrical Engineering Department.
[2] He served a one-year term as president of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S) from 1976 to 1977.
He was the editor for the Transactions Antennas and Propagation Society from 1980 to 1983 and International Journal of Electronics and Communications from 1975 to 2001.