Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam

Dr. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam is a Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering and heads IITM's Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre (HTIC) and Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre (SGBC).

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. His group’s technologies have resulted in 12 commercially successful products impacting 20+ million patients in India and abroad.

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 Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre. The Centre has developed a world-class high-throughput brain imaging pipeline that processes whole human brains into high-resolution digital images at petabyte-scale, and AI driven computing platform for analysis. It recently released the most advanced atlas of the developing human brain in second trimester, the first time such a global human brain resource has come out of India. This has garnered significant global visibility and appreciation, including a detailed editorial titled “India Gets a Seat at the Table of Human Brain Cartography”. The Centre is in a unique position to image 100+ human brains and generate the largest set of human brain maps in the world.

He has attracted and executed 80+ projects from government, industry and philanthropy worth over US$ 50+ million - largest by any faculty in India in the med-tech area. His work has yielded 50+ national and international patents.

He has graduated 11 PhDs and 60 Masters (Research) students who are currently faculty, leaders in industry, and startup founders. He has published 350+ peer-reviewed papers in leading journals and conferences in engineering, physiology, medicine and life sciences.

His group has the best track record in the last 15 years in the healthcare technologies area in the country in terms of R&D, publications, technology commercialization, sponsored projects, industry collaboration, guidance of research scholars, startup incubation and mentorship.

For his work and 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, Perry Blackshear Faculty Fellowship, JC Bose Test of Time award, and VASVIK award.

He is an elected Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering (FNAE).

In 2025, he was awarded the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar by the President of India, India’s highest recognition for outstanding and inspiring contributions in science and technology.