Dr Nuwantha Fernando in a Chartered Professional Engineer and a Member of the Engineers Australia. He specialises in electrical machines, drives and control. Dr Fernando has engaged with industry to develop high speed generators for microturbine power generation, aircraft power generation and low speed generators for vortex turbines.

Dr Fernando serves as an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion. The research interests of Dr Fernando include investigation of electric machines, drives and control systems in general.

He is particularly interested in the design of rare-earth free electric machine structures in addition to the investigation of new permanent magnet-based concepts such as magnetic gearing. Dr Fernando has also experienced with the design of electrical machines and drives for high-speed applications such as aero-engine embedded generators and control design for electric drives for high efficiency