About Dr. Ranjith R Unnithan

I am a Research Group Leader and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at University of Melbourne. My research areas span CMOS image sensors, drones based sensors and applications, electronic sensors for biomedical applications, thermal image cameras and nanophotonic engineering.

My career started as Scientist/Engineer at Indian Space Research Organization, Bangalore. I was involved in India's first mission to moon “Chandrayaan -1”. I was awarded with Young Scientist award by His Excellency, The President of India in 2007 for my contributions.

During my PhD in Electrical Engineering at Cambridge, I developed a voltage reconfigurable nanophotonic phase modulator with more than one million phase modulating elements in a very small area in silicon. After finishing my PhD, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher and project manager in the Electrical Engineering Department at Cambridge for a Samsung project. I joined the University of Melbourne as a lecturer in 2014.

INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP:

• Co-founder and Director of Sensor Research, Hort-Eye Pty Ltd, precision agriculture drone sensing company founded by a team from the University of Melbourne and aligned in partnership with XM2, a major drone equipment and services company.

• Won the Transurban Innovation Competition 2017 for research into a speed sensor with LED lights, which once attached to the road surface could provide real-time customised signals encouraging speeding drivers to slow down.

• Won two innovation competitions from Cambridge University Entrepreneurs in 2011, which were reported in Cambridge Elevator news as ‘25 Cambridge technologies that could change the world’.

• Awarded with CambridgeSens innovation awards both in 2009 and 2010