Professor Mandyam Srinivasan

Mandyam Veerambudi Srinivasan AM (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 Pune, India, he completed his undergraduate degree (in electrical engineering) at Bangalore University before gaining a master’s degree in electronics from the Indian Institute of Science in 1970. Moving to the USA, by 1977 he had gained an MPhil and a PhD in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale. 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, Srinivasan's research has been primarily focused 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 received the Prime Minister's Prize for Science in 2006.

Sam Leach's paintings typically examine the relationship between science, nature and technology, and are characterised by their modest scale and fine detail.

Commissioned with funds provided by Marilyn Darling AC 2014
© Sam Leach