Dr. Sabesan Sithamparanathan OBE
Dr. Sabesan Sithamparanathan OBE is the founder and CEO of PervasID, the Cambridge University spinout he built into a global enterprise providing the world's most accurate passive RFID tracking technology. Of Sri Lankan Tamil heritage, Sabesan read Electronic Engineering at the University of Sheffield — graduating top of his year and receiving the Sir William Siemens Medal — before completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge on passive RFID sensing systems.
His PhD research produced a fundamental breakthrough: an RFID reading system that achieves near-100% tag detection accuracy over wide areas, eliminating the dead spots that had plagued conventional RFID systems. He founded PervasID in 2011, was elected to a Research Fellowship at Girton College Cambridge, and in 2014 received a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship to commercialise his technology. The company's solutions are now deployed in NHS hospitals, aviation manufacturing facilities, and blue-chip retail chains.
Sabesan's remarkable career has been marked by extraordinary recognition: he has received the Royal Academy of Engineering's Young Engineer of the Year award, the Sir George Macfarlane Medal, a Queen's Award for Enterprise: Innovation (2021), an OBE in the King's 2024 New Year Honours, election as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal. In 2025, PervasID secured £3.25 million to roll out its TrackMaster 2X platform into retail and healthcare globally.
