Dr. Mitra is the USC Viterbi Gordon S. Marshall Chair in Engineering and Professor of ECE & CS. She is a member of the Communication Sciences Institute, the Signal and Image Processing Institute, and the Bridge Institute. She holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science.

Dr. Mitra's research has focused on problems in communication theory, information theory, and signal processing. While her early work centered on wireless communication systems as motivated by commercial applications, the current research endeavors to address fundamental questions at the boundaries of communication, estimation, and control for science. Early work on wireless communications focused on point-to-point communication (transmitter to receiver), then evolved to methods designed for networks of users. Some examples of key applications are wireless body area networks (WBANs) for mobile health, joint spectrum sensing, resource allocation & communication for cognitive radio, network design for collections of underwater autonomous vehicles, and microbial network applications. Dr. Mitra and her group also focus on applying and adapting modern statistical methods (sparse approximation, low-rank, etc.) to various communication and signal processing problems.

Dr. Mitra received the B.S. and the M.S. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in 1987 (high honors) and 1989 respectively, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. From 1989 until 1990, she worked as a Member of Technical Staff at Bellcore in Red Bank, NJ. In 1994, she received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in Electrical Engineering. From 1994 to 2000, Dr. Mitra was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. She became an Associate Professor in 2000. Dr. Mitra joined the University of Southern California in 2001 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2005. She was a Dean's Professor of Electrical Engineering from 2015 to 2017; she is currently the Gordon S. Marshall Chair in Engineering.