Vajira Dissanayake

Vidya Jyothi Prof. Vajira H. W. Dissanayake MBBS (Colombo), PhD (Nottingham), FNASSL
Prof. Vajira H. W. Dissanayake is the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo. He is also the Chair and Senior Professor of Anatomy; the Director of the Human Genetics Unit; and the Chair of the Specialty Board in Biomedical Informatics at the University. He has held medical leadership positions locally and internationally. He was the President of the Sri Lanka Medical Association in 2012 and the President of the Commonwealth Medical Association from 2016 to 2019. He is considered a global leader in the fields of biomedical and health informatics as well as genetics and genomics. In the field of biomedical and health informatics he was one of the founders of the Health Informatics Society of Sri Lanka in 1998 and its President from 2009 to 2019; founder the Commonwealth Digital Health Initiative in 2016 and founder Chairperson of the Commonwealth Center for Digital Health (CWCDH); the current President of the Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics (APAMI); a member of the Working Council of the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN); and the Vice President (Asia Pacific) of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA). In the field of Genetics and Genomics he is a founding Executive Board Member of the Global Genomic Medicine Collaborative (G2MC). He has over 20 years of experience in the fields of Genetics, Genomics, Biomedical Informatics. He was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences of Sri Lanka in 2013 in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the field of medicine. He was awarded the national titular honour of Vidya Jyothi for outstanding scientific and technological achievement in 2019.