Skip to main content

Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan

College position(s)

Fellow

Subject

Engineering

Specialising in

Enterprise Fellowship

Degrees, Awards and Prizes

BEng (Hons), MPhil, PhD, FERA, FIET, FREng

  • Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, 2021
  • Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation, 2021

Research themes

I am a multi - award winning entrepreneur with over 15 years’ experience in IoT space. I founded PervasID Ltd, based on my PhD research, into ‘Passive RFID real time sensing system for intelligent infrastructure’ at Cambridge University. I invented and developed the World’s most accurate passive RFID technology. As founder and CEO, I successfully grew PervasID, a Cambridge University spin-out company, from its inception to a global enterprise, providing transformative solutions to healthcare, industrial, security, retail and supply chain and logistics sectors with a complete product suite of the world’s most accurate RFID readers. Throughout my career, I have become an expert in entrepreneurship, strategic business development and innovation leadership. I am an authentic leader, able to build, motivate and develop teams to maximise performance and has the interpersonal and communication skills to forge positive relationships with internal and external parties.

My customers include the largest aircraft manufacturers, Stanley Black & Decker, blue chip retailers and NHS hospitals including Guy's and St Thomas' in London. Stanley Black & Decker also use the tags to track supplies from their tool cabinets used by aircraft manufacturers. Each cabinet contains over 1,000 tools, and it can result in serious safety incidents if any are left inside an aircraft. It is estimated that Foreign Object Debris (FOD) costs the aviation industry $13 Billion per year in direct and indirect costs, including flight delays, plane changes and fuel inefficiencies. In healthcare, PervasID solutions are being deployed in NHS hospitals for tracking surgical instruments to enhance decontamination and sterilisation processes and for tracking hospital assets to ensure that mission critical medical devices are available at the right place and time, for robust and efficient care. The need for this level of traceability of medical devices has been particularly evident in the COVID-19 pandemic. The solution is predicted to save £billions for NHS hospitals and will save lives. 

Other

I was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2023.

I was awarded the 2011 Royal Academy of Engineering ERA Entrepreneurs Award and the 2011 UK ICT Pioneers of Connected World award for my RFID breakthroughs. Subsequently I was elected to a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, and in 2014 was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship.

Since then I have been awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Young Engineer of the Year award, as well as the Sir George Macfarlane Medal 2016 for excellence in the early stage of my career and most recently in 2021 I've been awarded a Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation as well as Royal Academy of Engineering Silver medal. I was among the UK’s top 18 science and technology students to be awarded the Sir William Siemens Medal in 2006. I have also completed management leadership training at the Harvard Business School.  

Extra link