Dr Lalitha Ponnampalam received FirstClass Honours B.Eng. degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from University College London in 1992; the M.S.E.E degree from the School of Optics, University of Central Florida, USA in 1998; and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Cambridge in 2001. From 2001 to 2007, she worked as a Senior Scientist at Bookham Technology (now Lumentum Inc) in Caswell, a large provider of optical components, modules, and subsystems for optical telecommunications. She was one of the key contributors to the development of company’s wideband tuneable semiconductor lasers which are now central to Lumentum’s optical transceiver business. She then joined the Photonics Group at the UCL Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering as a Research Fellow in 2007 and is now an EPSRC Fellow at UCL.

During her undergraduate studies, she won the Departmental and Goldsmid Awards from the UCL Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and was a recipient of the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Fellowship and Overseas Research Studentship Award to pursue her PhD studies in 1998. More recently, she was awarded an EPSRC Open Fellowship to develop low-cost photonic integrated air pollution monitors for high precision and high-density sensor networks. She has numerous collaborations for cross-disciplinary research, both within the UK and internationally, and has more than 70 peer-reviewed publications. Her research interests include photonic integrated devices and systems, microwave and THz signal generation, optical frequency comb generators and fast tuneable wideband semiconductor lasers. 

Dr Ponnampalam is a Senior Member of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (SMIEEE), a member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (MIET) and a Chartered Engineer (CEng).