Don Mitchell is a research scientist working in the field of computer science and specializing in graphics and signal processing. His background is physics and math at the University of Minnesota and Caltech. From 1981–1992 he was a member of the technical staff of AT&T Bell Laboratories. From 1992–1994 he was at Princeton University, and from 1994–1999 he was a researcher at Microsoft Research. AT MSR, he was lead architect of the Virtual Worlds project, and later a researcher in the computer graphics department. He currently runs Mental Landscape LLC and is part owner of Global Wonder Inc. in Seattle.
Don's research work has often been focused on the signal processing and sampling problems in image synthesis, with a special emphasis on the problems of nonuniform sampling patterns. Recently he has been working on a history of the Soviet exploration of Venus.