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02 Jun 2017

Pranav Mistry Becomes Youngest Executive Director at Samsung Global

Pranav Mistry at the launch of Galaxy Gear

Pranav Mistry, head of Samsung Research America (SRA), has become the youngest executive director at Samsung Global after he was promoted from vice president to senior vice president at the latest Samsung annual executive-level reshuffle overseas. The 36-year-old Indian is currently head of Samsung Research America (SRA).

Mistry hails from Palanpur and is an alumnus of Vidyamandir’s Gujarati medium school. He joined Samsung in his early thirties and in 2013 was selected by Samsung to introduce its then latest innovation, the Galaxy Gear smartwatch and Galaxy Note 3 at Berlin's Internationale Funkausstellung, one of the world's largest trade shows for consumer electronics. Mistry was one of the key personnel in development of Gear.

Subsequently he became an executive in Samsung from December 2014.

Mistry did his Masters in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT and Master of Design from IIT Bombay after graduating in Computer Science and Engineering. He has worked a Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab as well as with Microsoft, Google, CMU, NASA, UNESCO, Japan Science & Technology among others.

His path breaking invention Sixth Sense, an innovative augmented reality (AR) technology which allows users to pop up a screen on the wall by moving their fingers and control it with their finger tips in the air, was first introduced by him at the Technology•Entertainment•Design (TED) talk in 2009,

In an earlier media interview, Mistry, had said he was encouraged to develop “a spirit of enquiry both at home and school”, and he recalls that "as seventh graders, my classmates and I would make rockets to see what made them fly, and models of remote-controlled motor boats because Palanpur had heavy rainfall".