Dr. Piyawattanametha received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, USA, in 2004. He serves as the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers conference chair in MOEMS and Miniaturized Systems XVIII of the Photonics West Conference.
In 2010, he co-founded and served as an executive member of the Global Young Academy, Halle, Germany. In 2013, he was selected by the World Economic Forum to be one of the 40 top scientists. In 2014, he received the Fraunhofer-Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Berlin, Germany. In 2017, he was selected to be a Leaders in Innovation Fellowships fellow from The Royal Academy of Engineering, London, United Kingdom. He has been appointed as an Adjunct Professor, Institute for Quantitative Health Sciences & Engineering, Michigan State University, Michigan, USA, since 2018.
In 2021, he was elevated to the SPIE Fellow Status and was selected to serve as a committee member on Addressing Inaccurate and Misleading Information about Biological Threats through Scientific Collaboration and Communication, The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Washington, DC, USA. In 2022, he was selected as Senior Editor of the IEEE Photonics Letters.