Associate Professor Sridhar Ravi serves as the Deputy Head of the School of Engineering and Technology at UNSW Canberra and leads the Bio-Engineering Research Group within the Engineering faculty at the University of New South Wales. He earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Aerospace from RMIT University in 2007 and a PhD from the same institution in 2011, focusing his doctoral research on the influence of wind turbulence on the aerodynamic performance of wings. From 2012 to 2014, Ravi held a postdoctoral position in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, where he investigated insect and bird flight in complex spatial and wind environments. Between 2015 and 2017, he conducted research on bio-inspired design and neuroethology of flight through complex environments at Chiba University under a JSPS Fellowship and at the University of Bielefeld under an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. Returning to Australia in 2017, he joined RMIT University as a Lecturer and transitioned to UNSW Canberra as a Senior Lecturer in 2019, later advancing to Associate Professor.

Ravi's research specializations encompass compliant musculoskeletal actuation in insects and bio-inspired designs for flying robots, robust flight control systems for miniature blimps, effects of passive wing rotation on the aerodynamic performance of flapping wings, influence of ground effect on oscillating wings, and voice-coil based wing actuation systems for flapping wings. His expertise includes biomechanics, bio-mimetics, fluid mechanics, flight control, fluid-structure interaction, compliant actuators, aerial and aquatic locomotion, neuroethology, collective behaviour, and insect flight. Notable publications include 'Propeller blade performance in low-pressure environments' (Physics of Fluids, 2026, with Bhat SS et al.), 'Letting go with the flow: directional abscission of dandelion seeds' (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2025, with Shields J et al.), 'Lift increment scaling and its failure due to the leading-edge vortex detachment transition for a flapping wing under perturbations' (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2025, with Jin BR et al.), 'How honeybees perceive and traverse apertures' (Journal of Experimental Biology, 2025, with Jakobi T et al.), and 'An immersed boundary-regularised lattice Boltzmann method for modelling fluid-structure-acoustics interactions involving large deformation' (Physics of Fluids, 2024, with Rajamuni M et al.).

Professional Email: sridhar.ravi@adfa.edu.au