Ritesh R. Mehta has recently completed his Ph.D. in Communication (with a focus on film/television industries) from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Ritesh is the son of Sonal and Romy Bapalal Mehta.

Ritesh successfully defended his dissertation in April. In it he studied the dynamics of students working together while making films at a film school in the Los Angeles area, and how student expectations, their knowledge processes and the pedagogical influence of the faculty and coursework all intersected in the professionalization of film students into filmmakers.

After completing high school from Greenlawns High School and junior college from Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai, Ritesh majored in marketing and management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He returned to the family business after graduation, but about five years later realised that his contributions would be stronger and more useful in academia than in a business career.

The initial phase of his nine-year return to university was devoted to studies related to cognitive science and philosophy at the University of California San Diego and the University of Missouri St Louis. Talking about these years, Ritesh says, “For the first time I felt that I got a real 'education' in that I was immersed in a coherent field, that even though it turned out to be way more analytic than spiritual, as I thought philosophy was (and as Eastern philosophy relatively is), and I learned a canon of subjects and methodological principles”.

However, for his PhD he took up studies related to the media and particularly, film and television and has spent the last six years at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the University of Southern California.

At USC, Ritesh also created and taught a course on contemporary American television and audiences; taught a course on public speaking (both of these at the undergraduate level), published a digital book called Flows of Reading: Engaging with Texts, as well as published articles and book reviews in diverse academic journals, including Cognition, Transforming Works and Cultures, International Journal of Communication, and Journal of Media Literacy Education.