ProfessorPubudu Pathirana

Pubudu is the Head of Discipline, Mechatronics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, a Professor in the school of Engineering and the Director of Networked Sensing and Biomedical Engineering Research Group at Deakin University.

He received First Class Honours in B.E(Electrical and Electronic) Engineering and B.Sc(Mathematic) in 1996, PhD in Missile Guidance and Control in 2001 from the University of Western Australia(UWA) with Merit Scholarship Scheme(MSS) and IPRS scholarships for his undergraduate and post graduate education respectively.

He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Oxford University, UK in 2000/2001, a research fellow in The University of New South Wales, Sydney and a consultant to the Weapons systems division of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) Australia 2002/2003, before joining Deakin University in March 2003. I was also a visiting Associate Professor at Yale University, USA in 2009.

He was a recipient of numerous research grants including ARC (Discovery, LIEF, ITRH), MRFF, DSTO in excess of 9M and published in numerous international journals and conferences in areas including, navigation, vision based guidance, swarm robotics, mobile computing/networking and applications into assistive devices and rehabilitation robotics covering over 300 refereed publications. He has been the principal supervisor for over 25 PhD graduates. He is also a reviewer for several international journals, transactions and conferences and an OzReader with the Australian Research Council. He has been engaged in collaborative research and developments with number of Australian and International companies and currently heads the Networked Sensing and Biomedical Engineering (NSBE) Research group at Deakin university.

The Ataxia Instrumented Measure(AIMs) and it’s more generic version BioKin™ devices developed by the Networked Sensing and Biomedical Engineering(NSBE) team led by Professor Pathirana is currently being used in a number of global clinical trials such as UNIFIED Natural History Study (UNIFAI) (https://www.curefa.org/clinical-studies/friedreich-ataxia-global-clinical-consortium-unified-natural-history-study-unifai/ in 26 locations across the world (https://www.curefa.org/research/initiatives/fa-global-clinical-consortium/#locations).

The devices have also been used as a secondary outcome measure in the following clinical studies: Micronised Resveratrol as a Treatment for Friedreich Ataxia (https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT03933163), Intensive rehabilitation for people with hereditary cerebellar ataxia (https://trialsearch.who.int/Trial2.aspx?TrialID=ACTRN12618000908235).