Dr. Dulika Sumathipala

Dr Dulika Sumathipala graduated from the Colombo Medical Faculty in 2007 with Second Class Honors. She completed a Masters in Clinical Genetics from the University of Colombo in 2012 and joined the department of Anatomy in 2013 as a lecturer. She completed CTHE and SEDA accreditation for training in higher education in 2013. Her interests are Genetics & Genomic Medicine with a special interest in neurogenetics. She is currently a PhD student in Medical Genetics at the University of Oslo, Norway under the supervision of Prof Eirik Frengen. Her project focuses on exploring the pathogenicity of DNA variants in whole genome sequencing data in patients with unexplained progressive encephalopathy.

She has received research grants from the University of Colombo for the study “Exome sequencing of extremely unusual phenotypes in five patients in the view of novel gene discovery”. In addition she has received the EMBO Short-Term Fellowship to carry out research in the lab of Dr. Christian Gilissen (Department of Human Genetics, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, Netherlands) as part of her PhD. She has published many scientific papers in indexed journals and has received the President’s award for scientific publication in 2013 and 2015.