Rudra Dutta was born in Kolkata, India, in 1968. After completing elementary schooling in Kolkata, he received a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, in 1991, a M.E. in Systems Science and Automation from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India in 1993, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA, in 2001. From 1993 to 1997 he worked for IBM as a software developer and programmer in various networking related projects. He has been employed from 2001 - 2007 as Assistant Professor, from 2007 - 2013 as Associate Professor, and since 2013 as Professor, in the department of Computer Science at the North Carolina State University, Raleigh. As of Fall, 2018, he is serving as Associate Department Head on an interim basis. During the summer of 2005, he was a visiting researcher at the IBM WebSphere Technology Institute in RTP, NC, USA. His current research interests focus on design and performance optimization of large networking systems, Internet architecture, wireless networks, and network analytics. He is a senior member of IEEE and a distinguished member (distinguished engineer) of ACM.

His research is supported currently by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Security Agency, and industry, including a recent CC-NIE grant and a JUNO grant from NSF. He has served as a reviewer for many premium journals, on NSF, DoE, ARO, and NSERC (Canada) review panels, as part of the organizing committee of many premium conferences, most recently as Technical Program Chair for the IEEE Sarnoff Symposium in 2016 and 2017, and Technical Program Chair for IEEE NFV-SDN 2017. He previously served on the editorial boards of the Elsevier Journal of Optical Switching and Networking, and the Springer Photonic Communication Networks journal, for several years.

He is married, has two children and lives in Cary, North Carolina with his family. His sister and her family live in Kolkata, India.