Venkat Venkataramanan is a physicist, innovator, educator, and entrepreneur. He is the Chief Scientific Officer at McRae Imaging, Toronto. He is an Industry Professor at the McMaster School of Biomedical Engineering at McMaster University and an Adjunct Professor at Materials Science & Engineering at University of Toronto. He is also the founder and Chief Technology Officer of Lumentra Inc.
Previously, he was the Director, Scientific Operations at the Impact Centre, University of Toronto, from 2006 to 2020. During that period, he initiated and served as the director of Smart Sustainable Lighting Network (SSLNet), an academia-industry cluster in Canada. Venkat was an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto from 2008-2011.
Following his doctoral degree in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, he held various research and teaching positions in the UK, India, Portugal, and Japan. He was a Leverhulme Commonwealth/USA Visiting Fellow at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK and a Japanese Government Science & Technology Research Fellow at RIKEN, Tokyo.
Venkataramanan is the Treasurer of the Colour Research Society of Canada. Previously he was the President Canadian National Committee of the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) from 2012-2019 and the Vice President (Canada) of the Joint Technical Committee ISO-CIE TC 274 from 2015-2019. He is a member of several CIE, ISO, ANSI, UL and CSA technical committees. Venkataramanan is also interested in science outreach; he has co-hosted science talk shows on radio and television for about four years.