PhD Student, Princeton ECE
I am a first-year PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University, where I am a member of the JHA Lab led by Prof. Niraj K. Jha.
Before Princeton, I earned my BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, graduating with First Class Honors, a perfect GPA of 4.0/4.0, and ranked first in my batch. I was advised by Prof. Roshan Godaliyadda, Prof. Parakrama Ekanayake & Prof. Vijitha Herath. I then worked as a Research Assistant at the Multidisciplinary AI Research Centre (MARC), University of Peradeniya.
My research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, knowledge graphs, LLM reasoning, and AI for healthcare. I am currently focused on developing reliable knowledge-grounded reasoning systems for LLMs, specifically investigating:
I am always happy to chat about research ideas or about cricket 🏏 — feel free to reach out!
A context-augmented training framework for multi-hop question answering over knowledge graphs. Supporting triples from the same source text form a context graph, and an adaptive repair pipeline strengthens one-hop facts before reinforcement learning. Validated on GraphMERT-extracted disease KGs for Gastroparesis and Diabetes, context-augmented supervision and RL improve compositional reasoning on harder multi-hop tasks.
Devised PoPDivergence and PoPStat, two metrics that condense a country's full population pyramid into scalar values and quantify their association with cause-specific mortality across 371 diseases and 200+ countries — outperforming traditional indicators such as median age, GDP per capita, and HDI. The framework was later extended to quantify demographic vulnerability to COVID-19.
A framework for optimizing psychomotor learning through human motion analysis. IMU motion trajectories are mapped to a performance space via task-specific quality metrics, enabling the identification of benchmark clusters and targeted remedial actions — validated on a table tennis forehand stroke case study.
Analyzed a survey of 3,020 households across Sri Lanka using factor analysis and unsupervised clustering, identifying distinct psychological groups and how interpersonal relationships mitigated psychological distress — with actionable insights for mental-health policy in future crises.
Used wearable IMU sensors to capture hand movements during welding tasks and trained ML/DL models to predict welding quality parameters, proposing a novel method for grading welders from beginner to expert. Received the Best Paper Award at MERCon 2024.
Combined an Extended Kalman Filter with Principal Component Analysis to estimate human joint angles from a wireless wearable IMU device, validated against YOLOv7-based vision estimates.
Undergraduate thesis on hand gesture recognition and gait analysis via wearable devices, advised by Prof. Roshan Godaliyadda, Prof. Parakrama Ekanayake, and Prof. Vijitha Herath. Ranked among the top 5 undergraduate electrical engineering projects island-wide and won the Gold Award at Techno Sri Lanka 2023.
† denotes equal contribution
Multidisciplinary AI Research Centre (MARC), University of Peradeniya
Researched AI applications in education, pandemic analysis, and biomedical wearables under Prof. Roshan Godaliyadda, Prof. Parakrama Ekanayake, and Prof. Vijitha Herath, in collaboration with the Faculties of Arts and Medicine. Developed baseline surveys, led data collection and analysis with AI analytics pipelines, and helped organize workshops and awareness sessions.
Department of Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering, University of Peradeniya
Conducted laboratory classes on end-to-end PCB manufacturing and facilitated tutorial sessions for undergraduate students.
Huawei Technologies Lanka Co. (Pvt) Ltd
Internship in the Huawei–Airtel managed-services project, working on Datacom, transmission, and BTS site operations.
Sasip Higher Education Institute, Nugegoda
Supported students preparing for Combined Mathematics in the G.C.E. Advanced Level examination.
Princeton University, USA
Member of the JHA Lab, advised by Prof. Niraj K. Jha (since January 2026).
University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
First Class Honors · GPA 4.0/4.0 · Batch topper (Rank 1 in the Faculty of
Engineering) · Rank 1 in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
Thesis: Hand Gesture Recognition and Gait Analysis via Wearable Devices.
Ananda College, Colombo (Grade 6 – A/L)
G.C.E. Advanced Level in Physical Sciences (Combined Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry).
Wadduwa Central College (Grade 1–5)