Dr. Sabesan Sithamparanathan OBE

Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan OBE FREng FIET was born in Sri Lanka, where he developed an early passion for engineering before winning a scholarship to study Electronic Engineering at the University of Sheffield. He graduated top of his year and was among the UK's top 18 science and technology students to receive the Sir William Siemens Medal. A brief role as a student engineer at ARM whetted his appetite for applied technology, and in 2007 he began a PhD at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Ian White, tackling the long-standing problem of dead spots in passive RFID tracking systems.

His doctoral research, conducted within the Department of Engineering at Cambridge and Corpus Christi College, produced what would become the world's most accurate passive UHF RFID location tracking system. In 2011 he was elected to a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, and was recognised with both the Royal Academy of Engineering ERA Entrepreneurs Award and the UK ICT Pioneers of Connected World Award. In 2014 the Royal Academy of Engineering awarded him an Enterprise Fellowship to support the commercialisation of his technology.

Dr Sithamparanathan founded PervasID to bring his Cambridge innovations to market, serving as Founder and CEO before transitioning to Founder and President as the company scaled globally. Under his leadership PervasID grew from a PhD spin-out into a global enterprise with customers across 40+ countries, including NHS hospitals, Stanley Black and Decker, major aircraft manufacturers, and blue-chip retailers. The company's Trackmaster platform achieves near-100% tag detection accuracy at 20-metre range from a single reader.

Among his many accolades, Dr Sithamparanathan was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering's Young Engineer of the Year award, the Sir George Macfarlane Medal 2016 for excellence, the Queen's Award for Enterprise: Innovation (2021), and the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal. In the King's 2024 New Year Honours List he was awarded an OBE for services to engineering and enterprise, and has since been elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is also a passionate advocate for STEM education in both the UK and Sri Lanka, and mentors students on entrepreneurship and research commercialisation.