Sunday, June 26, 2016

The visit of Dr. Shermin de Silva

Last Friday was  a busy day for me since I had two lectures to conduct one after the other from the morning. Firstly, it was Information security lecture from 8am to 10am and then it was Operating systems 2 lecture from 10am to 12pm. Luckily in the second lecture, Dr. Chamath was conducting the first half of the OS 2 lecture and therefore I was conducting a session just less than an hour. In the evening, I had a meeting with a final year student regarding the progress of his research project. Within this busy day with various activities, an important person visited our research group which was not ignorable. Therefore I decided to write a little note about this event.

Dr. Shermin de Silva (@Shermin_deSilva) is a well recognized ecologist who regularly visit Sri Lanka for her research projects based on Uda Walawe National Park regarding elephants. While working for the Smithsonian Institution in US, her activities for elephant conservation in Sri Lanka has made a great impact here. As we are working on few research projects related to human-elephant conflict, she was contacted by a one of our student members of the group who works on analyzing elephant infrasonic signals to locate them in the jungle. She was so happy to visit us and had a nice chat about the activities going on inside our group which relates to her work in the field. After having a short discussion in the lab, she joined with us for a lunch where we talked more about our work and future plans. She offered her help on various aspects of our future plans.

As a closing remark, I would like to share a talk Dr. Shermin has delivered in a TEDx event in 2012 where she talks about her passion towards elephant conservation.


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