I am a second year PhD student at the Center for Computational Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. I’m currently conducting research on detecting ribosomes within crowded cell environments in cryoEM images at the Lucas Lab.

I completed my BSc (Hons) in Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. I have previously interned at the University of Sydney, Australia as a Visiting Student Researcher advised by Dr. Anusha Withana. During this internship, I engaged in research in applying machine learning (ML) to address a problem in Human-Computer Interaction, specifically on personalizing gesture prediction.

I have also worked as a joint post-baccalaureate fellow at Harvard co-advised by Dr. Dushan Wadduwage at Wadduwage Lab and Dr. Sergey Ovchinnikov at So Lab. My research focuses on developing differentiable algorithms to address problems in microscopy design and structural biology.

Throughout my undergraduate years I engaged in research on applying ML to solve various problems in healthcare. I realized that there will never be a shortage of questions in healthcare and these problems arise due to the changes in the biological codes that govern life. Utilizing the data resulting from these biological processes, ML can be used as a tool to discover these biological algorithms and potentially address the problems in healthcare. This inspired me to pursue research in ML in biological imaging and computational biology.

When I’m not engrossed in research I spend my time singing, playing the piano, reading novels, watching movies or travelling.