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Lalitha Ponnampalam is a UKRI-EPSRC Open Fellow in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at University College London. Her research interests include photonic integrated devices and systems, microwave THz signal generation, and optical frequency comb generators, as well as fast tunable wideband semiconductor lasers. Ponnampalam's work focuses on leveraging photonic integration technology to develop generation of air pollution sensors, which are suitable for integration into high-density sensor networks for high precision monitoring of atmospheric constituents in real-time. She received a Class Honours B.Eng. degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from University College London in 1992, followed by an M.S.E.E degree from the School of Optics at the University of Central Florida in 1998, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 2001. From 2001 to 2007, she worked as a Senior Scientist at Bookham Technology (now Lumentum Inc). She has been a key contributor to the development of the company’s wideband tunable semiconductor lasers, pivotal to Lumentum’s optical transceiver business. Since joining University College London in 2007, she has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Departmental Goldsmid Awards at UCL and the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Fellowship for her PhD studies, and she has published over 75 peer-reviewed articles.