For excellence in cardiac surgery and biomedical engineering.

Professor Ajit P. Yoganthan, PhD, FAIMBE., FBMES., FASME., FAATS (Hon), has been bestowed the Lifetime Achievement Award for over four decades of dedication, distinction, and excellence in cardiac surgery and biomedical engineering. He has pioneered the field of translational cardiovascular engineering while demonstrating the value of applying basic engineering science to develop and evaluate novel cardiac technologies and devices that have benefited millions of patients worldwide.

Prof. Yoganathan was born on December 6, 1951, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, to physician parents Dr. Ponniah and Dr. Mangay (Navaratnam) Yoganathan. In 1973, he received a Bachelor of Science (First Class) in Chemical Engineering from the University College of London. In 1978, he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and in 1979, he joined the engineering faculty at Georgia Institute of Technology. While at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he and his colleagues contributed to the advancement of valve design, including the advanced transcatheter aortic valve model. In 2019, the transcatheter aortic valve model was successfully implanted into rock & roll icon Mick Jagger’s heart.

In 1985, Prof. Yoganathan was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship from West Germany. In 1992, he was elected a founding member of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.

He received the H.R. Lissner Award for his contributions to the field of bioengineering in 1997 from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In 2005, he was awarded the Theo Pilkington Award for his contributions to Biomedical Engineering education by the American Society of Engineering Education. That same year he was also appointed Chair of the Cardiovascular Sub-Committee (SC2), International Standards Organization Technical Committee (TC 150) on Implants for Surgery. In 2010 he was appointed the Founding Editor in Chief of Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology (CVET) – the newest journal of the Biomedical Engineering Society(BMES). CVET was accepted to PubMed in 2015.

In 2012, the Biomedical Engineering Society bestowed Prof. Yoganathan the Pritzker Lecturer Award, one of the highest honors awarded to a Member of BMES. In 2012, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) conferred him the Ann Newman Lecturer Award, and he was the only engineer awarded this honor. In 2015, in recognition of his significant contributions to the engineering field, he was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering in Washington, D.C. In addition, he was presented with the 2015 Standards Developer Award from the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation for his leadership and work on International and U.S. standards on cardiovascular medical devices. In February of 2017, he was awarded the Tamils’ Information’s Lifetime Achievement Award, presented to him by the mayor of Toronto at City Hall in Toronto, Canada. In 2020, he was inducted as the Inaugural Honorary Fellow of the American Association of Thoracic Surgery (AATS), the leading Cardiac Surgery Society in the world. In 2022 he received the Heart Valve Society’s Inaugural HVS Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sri Lanka Foundation International would like to thank and acknowledge Prof. Yoganathan, PhD. for his incredible work, selflessness, and contribution to life-saving medical technology.