About Dr. Ranjith R Unnithan

Dr. Ranjith R Unnithan is currently a Research Group Leader and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at University of Melbourne. His research areas span drone-based sensors and applications, multi-spectral sensors for biomedical applications, thermal image cameras and nanophotonic engineering.

Dr. Ranjith R Unnithan’s career started as Scientist/Engineer at Indian Space Research Organization, Bangalore. He was involved in India's first mission to moon “Chandrayaan -1” and awarded with Young Scientist award by His Excellency, The President of India in 2007 for his contributions.

During his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Cambridge, he developed a voltage reconfigurable nanophotonic phase modulator with more than one million phase modulating elements in a very small area in silicon. After finishing PhD, Dr. Ranjith R Unnithan worked as a postdoctoral researcher and project manager in the Electrical Engineering Department at Cambridge for a Samsung project. He 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 customized 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