Young Professional event 2015

As part of the APSL initiative for promoting knowledge transfer, a young professional event was held at the Sri Lankan High Commission in London on Friday, 20th March 2015.

This evening event was well attended by a mix of professional Sri Lankans, representing a range of expertise and experience.

Three successful young Sri Lankan professionals based in the UK delivered key-note speeches, on interesting and diverse topics, discussing their journey to success and aspects of their current work.

Dr. Rajika Perera, a senior scientist at a fast-growing start-up company in Cambridge, UK is former student of Royal College, Sri Lanka and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. His talk titled ‘En route to Kilimanjaro‘ was both a personal reflection of his journey and inspiring discussion of his work in exploring cancer cure.

Kanchana Ambagahawita, a Senior Economist at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka and a PhD student at the London School of Economics delivered a talk titled ‘Be the change you wish to see’. She discussed the ‘WorkInSriLanka’ initiative, a volunteer-led brain gain initiative for Sri Lanka, of which she is the founding Chairperson.

Dr. Dilrini De Silva, a Computational Bio scientist at the University of Oxford in genomic epidemiology with a PhD from Queen Mary University talked about ‘Genomic technologies in the clinical setting‘. She also discussed her ideas and involvement in promoting career prospects among Sri Lankan school children.

A lively panel discussion and a Q&A session followed the three talks where the audience and speakers engaged in a dialogue about various emerging issues around developing professional careers, improving education in Sri Lanka and addressing social issues linked to education in Sri Lanka. The event concluded with an informal networking session over refreshments.