Vice Chancellor’s Awards for Research Excellence 2019
Professor Rohini de Silva from the Faculty of Science received the Vice Chancellor's award for research excellence during the Postgraduate Convocation 2019 on the 29th of July 2022 at the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall.
Rohini M. de Silva is a Professor in Chemistry at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She completed her secondary education at the Anula Vidyalaya, Nugegoda. She obtained her B.Sc. Degree in Chemistry with First Class Honors from the University of Colombo. She was the recipient of many awards during her Undergraduate level. She was awarded the Studentship for earning the highest average in the first-year examination in Biological Sciences. She was also awarded the Dr. C. L. De Silva memorial prize for Chemistry for the highest aggregate in first and second-year examinations in Chemistry.
In addition, she was also awarded the Bhikaji Framji Khan Gold medal for Chemistry for becoming at the top of the chemistry special batch. She obtained her PhD in organometallic chemistry from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. She received Cambridge University Commonwealth Scholarship. She has also bestowed the Overseas Research Student Award at the University of Cambridge during her PhD. She received a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices, at the Louisiana State University, the USA where she excelled in the fields of materials science and nanotechnology. She won many research awards in her career. She won the Presidential Research Award for six years and a National Research Award presented by National Science Foundation. In addition, she has won Senate Awards for research in 2018 and 2019.
She has published over 60 Science Citation Index papers and one US patent and two local patents. Her present h-index is 21. Her main research areas involved water purification, value addition to natural resources, and Nanobiotechnology. She has established a strong collaboration with the School of Pharmacy, University College London, UK. Her research group has raised over Rs. 75 million by obtaining many grants from NRC, NSF, Royal Society UK, EPSRC UK, and UCL UK. A notable achievement was the winning of the NRC Target Oriented grant of Rs. 48.5 million in 2017. She has supervised over 140 undergraduates and 30 postgraduates, and the present research group consists of 6 PhD students, 12 undergraduate students, and 4 MSc students. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), UK. She is also a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society.
