Bedabrata Pain

Bedabrata Pain born in  27 March 1963 at West Bengal,  India and raised in Calcutta. He graduated from IIT Kharagpur MS from Columbia university with Ph.D in applied physics. Bedabrata worked with NASA until 2008 as a scientist, contributing to 87 patents. Best known for CMOS sensors, which are used in DSLR, mobile camera. Now, he is a director/producer in Indian cinema. He is executive producer of Amu, which was critically acclaimed.
Bedabrata's father was born in Dhaka and his mother came from Faridpur. Bedabrata Pain did his schooling in St. Lawrence High School in Calcutta & South Point High School and then studied Electronics & Electrical Comm. Engg. (ECE) in IIT Kharagpur(1982-1986),. He got an Ivy League scholarship. Later he went to Columbia University, New York and received his M.S and Ph.D in Applied physics in 1992. His future wife Shonali Bose also did her Masters Degree in Political Science from Columbia University.

 In 1993, Bedabrata Pain joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and managed JPL’s image sensor and focal-plane technology research and advanced development. Since 1993, he was associated with NASA. Concurrent with his NASA work, he taught courses on CMOS imaging at UCLA, chaired international conferences, and was the invited speaker at several conferences. He has published over 150 technical papers, and won several awards, including the Lew-Allen Award for Inventors.

In 1990s,Bedabrata Pain along with his four friends invented the active pixel sensor technology that produced the world's smallest camera and has been inducted to the US Space Technology Hall of Fame. Now it is used from cell-phone cameras to movie cameras (such as those used by RED) to those in space telescopes.
Bedabrata Pain had worked for NASA for 15 years as senior research scientist before quitting NASA in December 2008. Pain has 87 invention patents to his credit.

Bedabrata Pain is married to Shonali Bose. Now he is based in Los Angeles. Bedabrata and Shonali have lost their son Ishan, who died at a young age in an accident.
Bedabrata was the executive producer of the award-winning film Amu in 2005. He was the principal researcher for the documentary called Lifting the Veil on the impact of globalization in India, and the writer of the book titled ‘Behind the events in Kashmir’. He directed critically acclaimed film Chittagong starringManoj Bajpai, Vega Tamotia, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Barry John and Dibyendu Bhattacharya. Bedabrata, shot the film Chittagong with the same digital imaging technology that he with other NASA scientists had invented.