Bishnu P Pal is now Professor of Physics at Mahindra École Centrale Hyderabad India (formerly at IIT Delhi); Fellow of the Society and SPIE; Senior Member IEEE; Honorary Foreign Member Royal Norwegian Academy of Science; Member OSA Board (2009-11); President OSI (2012-15); Distinguished Lecturer IEEE Photonics Society (2005-07); NTNF (NTH Trondheim 1975-77), Alexander Humboldt (IPM Freiburg 1982-83), Fulbright (NIST Boulder 1991), and Erasmus Mundus (HW University Edinburgh) Fellow.

PhD’75 (IIT Delhi) on High Field Effects in Semiconductors; broad areas of post-PhD research have been Guided Wave Photonics with focus on designs of application-specific specialty optical fibers like dispersion-shifted, dispersion compensating, metro network-centric, Erbium-doped, and polarization maintaining; fabrication of all-fiber components like fused and side-polished fiber couplers, loop mirror, gain flattening filters and WDMs; and more recently microstructured fibers, all-fiber generation and transmission of mid-IR light and THz radiation, fiber optic and silicon waveguide- based sensors.

In 2016, Pal received the Esther Hoffman Beller Medal “for over thirty-five years of guided wave photonics education, including the development of graduate and continuing education teaching programs and laboratories in optoelectronics and optical communications at IIT-Delhi, inspiring a generation of leading academic and industrial scientists.”