Padmakumar R. Rao obtained his PhD from Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands) in 2009, where he studied the effects of radiation on CMOS image sensors.

He then worked at IMEC (Belgium) on hybrid backside illuminated image sensors for outer-space applications, and later at ON Semiconductor (Belgium).

He is currently a senior researcher at ASML (Netherlands), investigating novel detectors for various metrology applications.