Mandyam Veerambudi Srinivasan AM, PhD, DSc, FAA, FRS, FRIN (b. 1948) is Professor of Visual Neuroscience at the Queensland Brain Institute and in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland. Born in India, he completed his undergraduate degree (in Electrical Engineering) at Bangalore University before gaining a Masters in Electronics from the Indian Institute of Science in 1970. He then went to the USA, gaining an MPhil and a PhD in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University, awarded in 1973 and 1977 respectively. In 1978 he came to Australia, working for four years as a Research Fellow in the departments of Neurobiology and Applied Mathematics at the Australian National University before taking up an assistant professorship at the University of Zurich. He returned to Australia in 1985, completing a DSc in the ANU’s Research School of Biological Sciences in 1994. Since 1985, his research has been primarily focussed on examining the way that insects – in particular, bees – perceive and move within the three dimensional world, and on exploring how the findings might be applied to machine vision and robotics. To date, his team’s findings have informed projects such as the development of autonomous navigation systems for aircraft for clients such as NASA and the US Defence Force. Elected to the fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science in 1995 and of the Royal Society in 2001, Srinivasan was awarded the Centenary Medal in 2003, received the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science in 2006, and was named a member of the Order of Australia in 2012 for his services to neuroscience and the national and international science communities.
