National Academy of Sciences – Sri Lanka

Dear All

Prof Mohan Munasinghe, FNASSL will be the featured speaker in a Royal Commonwealth Society Canada event at 9:30 am EDT (7:00 pm SL time?) on Monday 18th October. The topic is Prospects for Sustainable Development in a Post-COVID Commonwealth, covering 2 issues that confront the entire world – Sustainability & Covid.

Please register early (preferably TODAY) at the link below, else the registration window may expire.

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/prospects-for-sustainable-development-in-a-post-covid-commonwealth-tickets-167588763503

AGM for 2021 will be conducted electronically at 4:00 pm on Wed 29 September 2021 (Preceded by a Guest Lecture by Rohan Pethiyagoda, FNASSL at 3:00 pm on Sri Lanka: the case for optimism)

Election of Fellows will be by electronic voting. You will receive a weblink for this by email.

Please see the following documents (click on link to open):

• Scientific achievements of all 26 nominees (one page each) – Annexure I
• List of nominees, proposers and seconders – Annexure II

General Secretary
National Academy of Sciences of Sri Lanka

The induction ceremony of Fellows elected in 2020 was held at 4:00 pm on Friday 22 January 2021 in “hybrid” mode, chaired by the President, Professor Priyan Dias. Only a small group of participants were present at the National Science Foundation Board Room, but a much larger number joined online.

There were four new Fellows inducted, namely Professor Sarath Abeykoon, Professor Saroj Jayasinghe, Professor Ranjith Senaratne and Dr Sirimal Premakumara. Of them, Dr Premakumara was elected a year earlier but could not participate in the corresponding ceremony. He was also the only inductee who was physically present. All the inductees, who were introduced by their proposers, presented brief accounts of their work.

The guest speaker for the event was Professor Sasanka Perera, a professor of sociology at the South Asian University. He spoke on the topic “Science, Belief and State Policy: Towards a Necessary Exercise in Discursive Disentanglement?”, using recent Sri Lankan (pseudo?) science related controversies as case studies, namely the Glyphosate ban, Ravana myth and “Dammika Peniya”. The text of his address can be found here; it was also published in the Daily Island.

The above publication on the important issue of STEM Education (i.e. Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) in our region has been compiled by the Association of Academies and Societies of Science (AASSA), and has country reports from Australia, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Turkey. The report on Sri Lanka (Chapter 8) has been contributed by NASSL Vice President Professor Nadira Karunaweera and Sajani Karunaweera. The report can be viewed online here.

An article published in PLOS Biology on 08-10-2020 with authors from Stanford University and Elsevier BV is linked to a publicly available database of 100,000 top-ranked scientists, together with the top 2% of scientists for every subfield. Scientists are classified into 22 scientific fields and 176 sub-fields. Ranking of scientists has reportedly been done using standardized information on citations, h-index, co-authorship adjusted hm-index, citations to papers in different authorship positions and a composite indicator. The career wide database covers the years 1996 to 2019, and includes articles, reviews and conference papers in the Scopus database (and corresponding citations). There are 16 scientists working out of Sri Lanka on this career-wide database. The database for 2019 alone has 14 scientists working out of Sri Lanka. The Academy congratulates these scientists, wishes them even greater outputs and outcomes from their work, and encourages others too. We can be proud that many of the scientists are Fellows of the Academy (indicated in red), including its current President and Vice-President.

Career-wide Database (1996-2019)

Database for 2019

COVID-19 has had a profound impact across the globe, affecting health and health services, impacting the global economy, and exacerbating social and economic inequalities. Global cooperation and effective policy are essential for tackling the virus and for ensuring a successful economic recovery. But the global pandemic does not change the fact that the world also continues to face an ever-growing environmental emergency. Indeed, COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of governments working together and we must build on this global response to address the climate crisis.

Click here for full statement