Sugata Sanyal received his Bachelor of Engineering degree with first class honors from Jadavpur University, India. He went on to do his M.Tech. degree in Computers and Control Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He received his Ph.D. degree for his work in "Computer Architecture: Some Aspects of Fault Tolerance and Coding Techniques" from the University of Mumbai, India.

In 1973, he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India and has remained there ever since. He is now a member of the Faculty in the School of Technology and Computer Science in the institute. Throughout his career, he has functioned in his capacity as a Senior Adviser to many leading companies like Crompton and Greaves Ltd., NELCO, Tata Electric Company to name a few, and is part of the Technical Boards of numerous others like Unit Trust of India. He has undertaken numerous projects in Computer Science for various organizations and government, prominent among them being "Design of Air Sector Data Handling System" for ECIL at New Delhi, "MathBraille" for the Government of West Bengal, and "Design of a high-reliability micro programmed bit-slice microprocessor-based computer" which was used at the Cyclone Warning Radar Centre at Chennai. He has functioned as a guide and researcher to many students from the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institute of Science and the University of Mumbai. His projects at TIFR span the fields of Computer Security, Computer Architecture,
Information Theory, and Speech Processing. He has published numerous research papers in leading national and international journals and conferences, as well as delivered lectures in diverse topics at some of the leading institutions of the country.

He is the Associate Editor of INFORMATICA, an international journal of computing and informatics. He is also the editor of International Journal of High Speed Computing (IJHSC). He has served on the Coordinating Committee of various conferences like TENCON 1989, Mumbai
and TELEMATICS 1987, Trieste and presently an Advisor of an International Conference, Computers and Devices for Communication (CODEC 2004). He has received many awards for his contributions to Computer Science and Engineering, including the VASVIK award for Electrical, Electronics Sciences and Technologies in 1985.