Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam

Dr. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam is a Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering and heads IITM's Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre and Brain Centre. After his PhD and postdoc stint in US, he returned to India in late 2008 with the goal of developing indigenous medical technologies and set up HTIC in 2011. Since then, HTIC has grown into a unique and leading med-tech innovation ecosystem in the country bringing together around 40 medical institutions, industries, government agencies in developing and deploying affordable healthcare technologies. Since 2020, he has been driving a large-scale multi-disciplinary effort at IITM combining neuroscience, engineering, medicine, and technology, culminating in the setting up of IITM’s Brain Centre. The Centre has developed a world-class high-throughput histology pipeline that processes whole human brains into high-resolution digital images at petabyte-scale.

His group’s technologies have resulted in 12 commercially successful products impacting over 12 million patients in India and abroad. Towards these efforts, he has attracted and executed 80+ projects from government, industry and philanthropy worth over INR 350 crores - largest by any faculty in India in the medical devices area. His work has yielded 50+ national and international patents, including global licensing of a patent portfolio, one of the largest such health-tech IP licensing by Indian academia.

For his healthcare technologies work in terms of R&D, publications, technology commercialization, sponsored projects, industry collaboration, guidance of research scholars, startup incubation and mentorship, and its impact, he received the INAE Young Engineer Award, IITM’s Early and Mid-Career R&D Awards, Mukta Pai Faculty Fellowship in Research for Social Impact, and the JC Bose Test of Time award.

He has graduated 11 PhDs and 33 Masters (Research) students who are currently faculty in leading institutions, young leaders in industry, and startup founders. He has published over 350 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals and conferences in engineering, physiology, medicine and life sciences.