I was born in Sri Lanka, a country of great natural beauty that also introduced to the world its first female prime minister in 1959.  I grew up with parents who instilled in me the strong sense that one was defined by one's accomplishments and treatment of others, rather than by pedigree or material wealth.

 

It was during my undergraduate studies at University of Colombo that I developed my passion for biology.  I majored in Zoology and graduated with the First Class Honors degree.  I knew by then that academia was my chosen profession.  My professors, all of whom had been British trained, suggested that I go to Oxford or Cambridge.  I informed them politely that I was going to America.  Having been born and raised in a British colony, I wanted to experience the New World.

 

I received an East-West Center Fellowship to the University of Hawaii, the same institute where President Obama's father had been a student many years previously.  I studied for a Master's degree, focusing my research on the impact of introduced rodents on endangered Hawaiian honeycreepers on Mouna Kea, with funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Faced with a finding that defied the expectations and met with some skepticism --- that rodents were more endangered on the high slopes of Mouna Kea than the honeycreepers themselves --- I had the difficult task of turning a negative result into a publishable thesis.  I managed to do this by showing that a combination of the rodent’s temperature tolerance, their feeding habits and the native tree distribution in the forest, led to an ecological separation that minimized the impact of introduced mammals on the native birds on Mauna Kea.  

 

My Master’s research had made me realize that experiments alone were not enough to understand how organisms respond to changes in their environments.  One needed to combine experiments with mathematical models that could both explain the present and predict the future.  With this goal, I joined the Ph.D. program in Ecology at the University of California, Irvine.  There I learned everything from mathematics to effective communication.  I found that it was possible to aim high and achieve the heights one aimed at, without harming others; that the greatest fulfillment from scientific discovery came not from the accolades one received, but from the capacity to keep delving into a question until one found answers.   

 

I was an apt pupil. I found that I had a facility for using mathematics to solve biological puzzles. I threw myself into my work with a renewed passion.  My work started to gain some recognition.  I received numerous grants and fellowships, including a Chancellor's Dissertation Fellowship and a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF). I published my dissertation in reputed scientific journals, finished my Ph.D. in five years, and went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), an NSF-funded research institute at the University of California Santa Barbara.  In 2000, having completed the two-year postdoc, I started my first faculty position as an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago.

 

There began a period that was, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, the best and the worst of times.  I had lost my younger brother to the civil war raging in Sri Lanka, and my mother to a long illness.  A month before I was to start my job at UChicago, I learned that my father had terminal cancer.  My first year at UChicago was spent not establishing my research program as I had expected to, but traveling back and forth from Chicago to Sri Lanka to spend time with my father.  What I drew solace from was my innate curiosity about biological puzzles and the excitement of finding new questions to answer, which had been dimmed but not extinguished by personal tragedies.  My efforts, although slowed down by divided priorities, did bear fruition.  In the two years preceding my father's death in 2002, I was awarded the American Society of Naturalists' Young Investigator Prize and a $397,000 research grant from the National Science Foundation's Ecology panel.  

 

The period 2002-05 was a heady, but bittersweet, time for me.  My first child was born almost exactly a year after my father's death.  At the same time, my career was starting to ascend.  My research on the effects of habitat destruction on biodiversity was becoming increasingly well-known. This in turn led to invitations to the Editorial Board of Ecology Letters, Faculty of 1000 in Biology, and to speak at numerous international symposia and conferences. In 2005, while still an assistant professor at UChicago, I was elected President of the Theoretical Ecology section of the Ecological Society of America.    

 

It was during this time that I discovered another passion that went hand in hand with research: mentoring students. I found that it was not sufficient to wake up every day with the anticipation of doing yet another exciting research project.  I wanted to share that excitement, and the concepts and skills that were needed to translate that excitement into action, with others. As academics we mostly mentor graduate students and postdocs.  Having encountered the exceptionally bright undergraduate body at the University of Chicago, I took a different route.  I concentrated my initial mentoring on undergraduates.  This was because of my strong belief that it was only through early training in quantitative reasoning that one could contribute towards producing those exceptional scientists who go on to revolutionize their fields.  I mentored over 15 students within the span of five years, several of whom went on to graduate studies in Ecology and Environmental Biology.  

 

In 2006 we moved back to California for personal reasons, and I accepted a tenured position at the University of California Los Angeles.  I had a second child, and I decided to change the focus of my research.  I moved away from the topic of biodiversity in fragmented environments into a completely new area of research.  I wanted to understand how climate change affected biodiversity and the control of agricultural pests.  I spent a great deal of time learning about how temperature affects animal physiology, and connecting these ideas with the basic principles of ecology and evolution.   

 

The ensuing period has been a time of achievements and upheaval. I received a number of awards and fellowships, including a Complex Systems Scholar Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation and a Visiting Senior Research Fellowship to the University of Oxford, culminating in my election as a Senior Fellow of the Ecological Society of America.  I started receiving invitations for plenary and keynote addresses, endowed lectures, international symposia and workshops, contributions to important books and journals, and seminars at numerous universities in the U.S. and abroad. I procured nearly 3.0 million USD in extramural funding for my new research program, most of which came from the National Science Foundation.  In 2021, I received a Guggenheim Fellowship to take my climate change research in a new direction.  In 2022, I received the Robert H. MacArthur Award from the Ecological Society of America, the highest honor a mid-career ecologist can receive.

 

I have been steadfast in my dedication to mentoring. I make special efforts to encourage female and minority students to engage in research with a strong quantitative emphasis.  I believe that efforts to increase gender and ethnic diversity in STEM should start at the undergraduate level. I try to teach students the important role that mathematics and statistics play in addressing not only fundamental scientific questions, but also applied issues of biomedical (epidemiology and novel pathogens) and environmental (conservation, climate change) importance.  I try to show that integrating biology and mathematics requires not so much the mastery of mathematics as the biological insight into the questions that matter for science and society. I have been fortunate to see my attempts bear fruition.  My graduate students have gone on to postdocs at prestigious venues (Yale, Princeton, Stanford, ETH Zurich).  What I am proudest of, though, is undergraduate mentoring. A career total of nearly 100 undergraduates speaks to my commitment and dedication to training and mentoring.  A number of these students have won the first prize for best undergraduate research projects, received intramural fellowships, and have first-authored papers in high profile journals.

 

This last decade has also brought greater awareness of my role as a woman and a person of color in academia. I have experienced my share of racism and discrimination, being denied promotions, being told I was not good enough. This is not a new story, but the story of all people of color who struggle daily to have their accomplishments recognized. My husband's tragic and untimely death in 2016 robbed me of the constant support and encouragement I had been so fortunate to have for most of my adult life.  I have, painfully but with resolve, helped my two young children move forward from this tragedy, and continued to be a good mentor and scientist. I have also become an activist for social justice, asking difficult questions about systemic racism and discrimination at my own institution, seeking real change instead of vague promises. I was vocal about these issues before George Floyd’s murder rocked the foundations of this country; I have been even more vocal since then about the University taking action to root out racism and discrimination. Balancing science with activism has been a challenge. But I am strong in my resolve to dedicate my career to excelling in science and helping others, regardless of who they are, to do the same.