Prasenjit Mitra received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2004, his M.S. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993, and his B.Tech.(hons.) in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. He worked as a senior member of technical staff at Oracle Corporation from 1995-2000. He was one of the co-founders and the inaugural director of the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence at the Pennsylvania State University, where he was a tenure-line professor from 2003-2024. From 2018-2021, he served as the associate dean for research for the College of Information Sciences and Technology. He has also supervised or co-supervised over 20 Ph.D. dissertations.

He has co-authored over 200 peer reviewed papers, some of which have been awarded best paper awards, including the Test of Time Award by the IEEE VIS for his paper in the International Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology, the premier publication venue in visual analytics in 2021 and a best paper award at ISCRAM, etc. His work has been highly cited (h-index 66, ~16,750 citations). His research has been supported by the NSF CAREER award, the DoE, DoD, NGA, Microsoft Research, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Dow Chemicals, McDonnell Foundation, BMBF (Germany), the Afretec Network, etc.