Dr. Pandiyan was born and raised in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering and Master’s in Medical Electronics from Anna University, Chennai, India. He earned his Ph.D. at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, developing a digital holographic microscope for three-dimensional volumetric imaging of living cells. Following his doctorate, he did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he combined adaptive optics with optical coherence tomography to create a retinal camera for measuring the light-induced retinal function in a living human at a cellular scale.