John Amirthiah, a Sri Lankan in California, who is the President and CEO of J Med Supplies (a J Holdings company) was awarded “Top 10 Inspiring Leaders of 2022” by IE Magazine: https://ie-mag.com/John-Amirthiah-President-&-CEO-of-J-Med-Supplies-Top-10-Inspiring-Leaders-of-2022.php John’s company J Med Supplies delivers Durable Medical Equipment (DME) all over the West Coast and was awarded due to their expansion under John’s leadership. Congratulations to J Med Supplies and John!
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This past weekend marked Weekend One of the two Coachella weekends for 2023. If you’re familiar with the festival, you’ve seen the massive art installations transforming the Empire Polo Field into a new universe. Seeing these large-scale art installations in person while attending the festival is quite something. We wanted to highlight this year’s Coachella installation created by Sri Lankan Kumkum Fernando. Kumkum is a Sri Lankan-born artist who creates masterpieces inspired by his Sri Lankan heritage. His work has been featured at the Singapore Art Museum, Ho Chi Minh Museum of Fine Arts, and in numerous publications. You can get a taste of his creations on his website kumkumfernando.com. For Coachella 2023, Kumkum created 3 massive sculptures titled “The Messengers”. The sculptures were between 65 and 75 feet tall and stood out prominently on the Empire Polo Field. He was joined by Coachella installation artists Güvenç Özel, Maggie West,
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Associate Prof Udantha Abeyratne is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, USA, and a Member of the Australasian Sleep Disorders Association. His research expertise is in medical instrumentation and signal processing. He leads several research projects in developing algorithms and electronic implementations for diagnosing and treating sleep apnea and respiratory diseases such as pneumonia. Among the notable recent success in this area is a pioneering and fully automated technology to diagnose sleep apnea by the analysis of snoring (and breathing) sounds, wearable technology for the quantitative, real-time estimation of daytime sleepiness in work environments, and a unique automated technology for the diagnosis of childhood pneumonia in resource-poor regions of the world.  Associate Prof Abeyratne received the Bachelor’s degree from the University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, the Master’s degree from the University of Tokushima, Tokushima, Japan, both in electrical and electronic engineering, and a Ph.D.
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Ranil Malcolm Jayawardena, born in September 1986, is a British politician serving as Secretary of State for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs since 2022. He served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Trade from 2020 to 2022. Ranil Jayawardena MP was first elected as the Member of Parliament for North East Hampshire in May 2015 and was re-elected in 2017 and 2019. Prior to his election to Parliament, he was a Councillor, serving as Deputy Leader of the Borough of Basingstoke and Deane. An alumnus of the London School of Economics, he combined his service in local Government with working for Lloyds Banking Group plc and is a Freeman of the City of London. He also has wide-ranging commercial experience in the pharmaceutical, construction, transport, and leisure sectors. After his election in 2015, Ranil was quickly elected by fellow MPs to the Home Affairs Committee and, following the decision
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 Poet, novelist, and editor Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka in 1943. He lived in England as a child, and when he was 18, he moved to Canada. He earned a BA from the University of Toronto and an MA from Queens University. He has received many awards for his work, including two Governor’s General Awards and the Booker Prize for his novel, “The English Patient” (1992).  In 2018 Michael Ondaatje was among five contenders for the title of greatest-ever winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction awarded by the Los Angeles Times. Ondaatje is one of Canada’s most important contemporary writers and one of the country’s significant cultural exports.  Michael Ondaatje is the author of more than 20 works of poetry and fiction, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Running in the Family, Coming through Slaughter, In the Skin of a Lion, and The
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Sajith Wickramasekara founded Benchling in 2012 as a digital version of a scientist’s lab notebook. A year later, when Wickramasekara appeared on the Forbes Under 30 list, the biotech R&D software startup had raised $6 million at a valuation of $17.5 million. Today Benchling has more than 600 customers, including Regeneron, Sanofi, and Syngenta. It is worth $6.1 billion following a recent financing round led by Franklin Templeton and Altimeter. Wickramasekara was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. He attended the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics and later entered college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT, he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  He worked as a research assistant during high school and realized R&D relied too heavily on pens and paper. So he built Benchling, now worth $6 billion and backed by over $400 million in VC funding. Benchling is a software platform for scientists doing breakthrough research
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Cyril Dharmawardana Foundation (CDF) is an Australian-based Non-Profit charity organization founded in 2013 in Sri Lanka by Binara Dharmawardana to provide transportation facilities for every single Cancer and other terminally ill patient at the time of their treatment. To enable a comfortable return and dignity without them getting exposed to infectious diseases when traveling on public transport. This is probably the only State of the art Non-Emergency Ambulance service dedicated to Cancer in the Developing World. 
This service is free of charge regardless of the patient’s travel distance. This facility currently operates in the Southern and North Central regions of Sri Lanka and in the main Cancer hospital in the Western Province of Colombo. With ongoing donor support, CDF plans to implement and extend this facility to other Cancer hospitals. CDF also contributes to a world leader in Cancer Research, the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center in Australia to find a
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“The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,” written by Shehan Karunatilaka, a supernatural satire set amid a murderous Sri Lankan civil war, has won the Booker Prize. The Sri Lankan writer’s novel is about a war photographer who wakes up dead, has “Seven Moons” to try and unravel the mystery surrounding his passing and aid in the disclosure of a collection of images that will shock war-torn Sri Lanka, and ask his friends to find his photos and expose the brutality of war. The writer said he decided in 2009 to write “a ghost story where the dead could offer their perspective” after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, “when there was a raging debate over how many civilians died and whose fault it was.” Camilla, the Queen Consort of the United Kingdom, presented the Prize, and the author said it had been “an honor and a privilege” to
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Chamath Palihapitiya is a highly-successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist in the San Francisco Bay area. In 2021, he was ranked tenth on Forbes magazine’s new billionaires’ list. Palihapitiya founded and is the CEO of Social Capital based in Silicon Valley, California, established in 2011 to invest in companies in fields being ignored by other venture capitalists, like health, financial services, and education. However, the firm has since expanded to invest in tech companies like Amazon, Tesla, and Slack. Before founding Social Capital, Palihapitiya served as Facebook’s (now Meta) vice president of operations in several capacities, including as a lead developer. He is credited with helping orchestrate the social media platform’s massive growth. Palihapitiya was born in Sri Lanka in 1976 and moved to Ottawa, Canada as a child at age five. He received his Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo, resides in Northern California, is a
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Professor Mohan Munasinghe, a Sri Lankan engineer, physicist, and economist specializing in energy, water resources, sustainable development, and climate change, was awarded the 2021 Blue Planet Prize, the top global environmental sustainability award “the Environmental Nobel Prize.” Professor Munasinghe and Mrs. Sria Munasinghe attended the ceremonies for the Blue Planet Prize hosted by the Asahi Glass Foundation in Tokyo, where they were felicitated by Royalty and other grandees of Japan. The ceremony had been postponed to October 2022 due to the Covid Pandemic restrictions in 2021. The Royal Highnesses Crown Prince Akishino and Princess Kiko of Japan granted Prof. Munasinghe and his wife an exclusive audience. In addition, they exchanged mutual felicitations with HRH Sonam Dechen Wangchuck, who attended the ceremony on behalf of her father, His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the Fourth King of Bhutan, the 2022 Blue Planet Prize laureate. The award recognizes Prof. Munasinghe’s extensive environmental and
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