Prof Sudesh Sivarasu
DSI/NRF South African Research (SARChI) in Biomedical Engineering & Innovation & Head of UCT MedTech
Director of UCT’s Biomedical Engineering Research Centre
Professor in Biomedical Engineering
Prof. Sivarasu is the DSI/NRF – SARCHi South African Research Chair in Biomedical Engineering Innovation. He is a professor of biomedical engineering from the Department of Human Biology, University of Cape Town. He is the Director of UCT’s Biomedical Engineering Research Centre and the head of UCT MedTech. .
Dr. Sivarasu is currently listed as UCT’s prolific inventor with the second most active inventions portfolio across the University. He holds over 65 patent applications across 21 patent families of which over 26 patents have been granted across, USA (3), UK(3), South Africa(5), EU(7) and India(4). He also holds 3 open-source innovations to this credit. His innovations have led to 3 start-up companies from UCT namely reScribe Therapy, Impulse Biomedical and VAS MedTech. These companies were started by student innovators trained at the UCT’s MedTech laboratories.
Dr. Sudesh Sivarasu conceptualised the multi-award winning FrugalBiodesign™, a unique medical device innovation methodology. He founded the Medical Devices Lab and co-founded the Orthopaedic Biomechanics Lab. This multi-award winning lab has produced several medical technologies such as reScribe, Laxmeter, PatRig, OpenSource Ptosis Crutches, Zibipen, Easysqueezy and the FlexiGyn platform.
Dr. Sivarasu’s research focuses on developing appropriate health technologies with a special focus on their suitability and translation towards low resourced settings. He has supervised 43 students to completion (including 5 PhD’s, 31 MSc’s & 9 Hon’s students). He is currently supervising 18 students (which include 10 PhDs and 18 MSc students). Dr. Sivarasu has published widely in the field of medical device innovation and orthopaedic biomechanics. He has over 50 peer-reviewed journal publications and 52 peer-reviewed conference publications in addition to 1 book and 12 book chapters.
Dr. Sivarasu is the recipient of UCT Deputy Vice-Chancellor’s award for achievement in Innovation, DST’s Innovation Bridge Award , NSTF-South32 TW Khambule award for Emerging Researcher in addition to other 16 MedTech awards across 4 continents. He is an elected member of the Global Young Academy (GYA) and the South African Young Academy of Science (SAYAS).