Sumudu Herath Mudiyansalage is a student of Royal College, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Soon before his school graduation in 2010, he was ranked second in the country for GCE AL examination in physical science stream. After he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka, he was awarded a prestigious Cambridge Trust Scholarship to pursue his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge. Further, he bypassed the Master’s degree requirement due to his exceptional performance in Bachelor’s degree.
He received the Gold Medal for the Most outstanding graduand in both academic and extra-curricular activities of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Moratuwa. In addition, he was awarded the Gold Medal for the first rank in Civil Engineering where he achieved a record-breaking GPA of 4.12(/4.20) which remains the highest in department history. At the same convocation, he received 11 more awards for all-round excellence. Some of his awards during his life at University of Moratuwa include: Dean’s List for obtaining Grade Point Average (GPA) above 3.8 in all academic semesters; National Prize for Enterprise Strategy (E3) in May 2012 CIMA exams (World rank 95); National Prize for Corporate Reporting (P2) in June 2013 in the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) exams (World rank 7), Poh Scholarship recipient (out of 40,000 students).
Sumudu’s doctoral thesis contains his original research works of machine learning in homogenization and design of technical textiles for space structures at the University of Cambridge. His collaborations with NUS, Singapore and Cambridge, UK has led him to publish his works in high impact internationally peer-reviewed journals and conferences. To date, Sumudu is a co-author of more than twenty such scientific publications. Sumudu currently is a visiting professor at the TU Darmstadt where he looks at novel ways of simulating material systems using various statistical techniques.
He is very involved with the Sri Lankan community by: volunteering as a mentor for undergraduate students on their research and career prospects, advisor on foreign higher study opportunities for budding engineers from Sri Lankan Universities, mentor of the Sustainable Education Foundation (SEF), a non-profit organization to improve the quality of education in Sri Lanka.
