Sudesh Sivarasu Ph.D is an associate professor of biomedical engineering from the department of human biology in the faculty of health sciences of University of Cape Town (UCT). He is a qualified electronics and instrumentation engineer with masters and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from VIT University, India. His research focuses on developing appropriate health technologies with a special focus on its suitability and translation towards low resourced settings. He is the head of medical devices research group and orthopaedic biomechanics research groups at UCT.
A/Prof Sivarasu has supervised 4 Ph.D’s and 22 Masters students to completion and presently supervising 4 Ph.D’s and 9 Masters students. His research has been successfully funded by several national and international funding agencies including the NRF, MRC, SHIP, DTI, DST, TIA, USAID, DST-India & UCT.
A/Prof Sivarasu also conceptualized the multi-award winning FrugalBiodesign™, a unique medical device innovation methodology. A/Prof Sivarasu is a serial MedTech innovator with over 19 patent application families, including 45 patent applications and 10 granted patents from USA, UK, South Africa and India. He also has over 75 peer reviewed publications and is associated with 2 MedTech start-up companies from his inventions. A/Prof Sivarasu is the recipient of UCT Deputy Vice-Chancellor’s award for achievement in Innovation in September 2017, DST’s Innovation Bridge Award in 2017 and NSTF-South 32, TW Khambule award for Emerging Researcher in 2016 in addition to other 16 MedTech awards across 4 continents. He was elected as a member of the Global Young Academy (GYA) in 2019.