Ravi Silva is the Director of the Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) and Heads the Nano-Electronics Centre (NEC), which is an interdisciplinary research activity. The ATI has over 150 active researchers working on multidiscipline programmes with the NEC being a major research group within the institute. He joined Surrey in 1995. Ravi's secondary education was in Sri Lanka, after which he joined the Engineering Department at Cambridge University for his undergraduate and postgraduate work. He was a recipient of Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Fellowship while at Cambridge and member of Clare College.

His research has resulted in over 600 presentations at international conferences, and over 550 journal papers, Over 17,000 citations (Google Scholar), and a Google H-factor of 66. In 2002 he was awarded the Charles Vernon Boys Medal by the Institute of Physics, and in 2003 he was awarded the IEE Achievement Award.In 2003 he was also awarded the Albert Einstein Silver Medal and Javed Husain Prize by UNESCO for contributions to electronic devices.In 2003 the largest EPSRC Portfolio award for £6.68M was awarded to Prof. Silva and his team on Integrated Electronics which examined nanoscale design featrues on the optical and photonic device properties. In 2004 by a SRIF award for £4M to set up a Nano-Electronics Centre for multidisciplinary research was awarded and allowed the enhancement of nano-bio activities via the EU Sensation and EU Carbio programme.