Background
Panicker was born in Mavelikara, Kerala, India.
Panicker was born in Mavelikara, Kerala, India.
He attended Indian Community School, Kuwait. Panicker holds an Master of Surgery and Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), India. As part of his Doctor of Philosophy at Stanford, Panicker worked at the interface of machine learning and optics.
Panicker currently serves as the President of Embrace Innovations, a social enterprise that designs and brings to market healthcare technologies for the developing world, starting with an infant warmer. The Embrace infant warmer costs less than 1% of a traditional incubator, and is currently being distributed across clinics in India. He is also an alumnus of the design school at Stanford.
His thesis work demonstrated a 10 to 100 fold increase in capacity of multimode optical communication systems
His work combined convex optimization, machine learning, adaptive optics and spatial light modulators. Before starting Embrace, Panicker worked briefly at Infinera Corporation.
Panicker was chosen as a Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year in 2013. Embrace
In 2007, while studying at Stanford, Panicker and a few other fellow graduates were part of a class, Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, at the d.school at Stanford University.
They were asked to create a low-cost infant incubator that could be used in developing countries.
They designed an infant warmer that worked without electricity, was expected to be low-cost, and was designed for use even by rural mothers in developing countries. After the class, they co-founded Embrace (non-profit), a 501(c)(3) non-profit, in 2008 to bring their project to life. The non-profit entity, Embrace, donates infant warmers to clinics in need, and the for-profit social enterprise, Embrace Innovations, sells the warmers to other clinics.
While there, he worked in a team led by co-founder, President, and member of the Infinera Board, David F. Welch, Doctor of Philosophy, in the new products group, working on ultra hi-speed optical telecom systems In December 2013, Panicker and the other co-founders of Embrace, Jane Chen, Linus Liang and Nag Murty received The Economist Innovation Award for Social and Economic Innovation. He was also a Technical Award laureate in 2012, and an Echoing Green fellowship Foreign his work, Panicker has also been awarded the INDEX: Design to Improve Life award in 2011, International Design Excellence Awards ( the International Development & Education Award), 2012, and the Fast Company Innovation By Design Awards, 2012.
He is also a member of the FICCI Health Innovation Task Force in India.
