I can think of heaps of things to write here but not too sure where to start from, so will start from the very beginning. I was born on the 14th day of May 1981 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. According to my parents I had gone to Birmingham, England when I was about 5 months old and stayed there for about 3 years with them while they were doing their postgrad. I can't remember living there at all but still got quite a few old photographs which sort of look funny now. My parents had even dressed me up in a frock with an alice band and some flowers on my head!

I started schooling at Nalanda College, Colombo when was 5 years old and studied there for 11 years. I played quite an active role in quite a few clubs and societies but I think the 2 main activities were being a College Senior Prefect and representing the college badminton team. I was a Junior Prefect for 2 years and a Senior Prefect for 3 and I think that was quite an experience. Helped me realise that taking responsibility and dealing with the youngsters wasn't a very easy task after all! I started playing badminton for college when I was 12 years old and represented the school until I left Nalanda in 1997 after completing my GCE O'Level. Actually I'm quite happy to say that I was a member of the college team that won at least 10 All-Island-Inter-School Tournaments. Recently when I was browsing the Nalanda College website I was quite surprised to that our names were also there under Sports > Badminton. Being awarded College Colours for 2 consecutive years was another great achievement I had at Nalanda.

In 1998 I changed schools and started going to Royal College to study for my A'Levels. Didn't quite have the time here for much extra curricular activities and I'm sure those of you who have done the local A'Levels just know what I'm talking about! At the time of writing this I've completed by Bachelor of Engineering Degree, but still I think getting through A'level has probably been the toughest hurdle in my life so far, especially getting entrance to the Engineering Faculty in Sri Lanka! I sat my A'Levels in August 2000 and passed with a district rank of 151 while the total intake from Colombo was around 175, so yes..I just made it! I represented the Royal College Badminton Team in 1999 and 2000 and was actually lucky enough to be awarded College Colours for year 2000. I was highly thrilled around that time because I had been there only for 2 years and getting Colours from Royal wasn't that easy after all! If you want to see some of my school photographs please click here.

Around the time I was studying for my A'Levels I had this craze to go overseas and study, but dad made it a point that I should not go abroad and just get a degree just because I couldn't get through to local university. Since I did make it he didn't mind sending me overseas and my initial plan was to go to University of Melbourne or Monash in Australia. However around the same time my parents got permanent residency in New Zealand, so I ended up coming here, to Auckland in February 2001. Parents joined me in May, after about 3 months after I came and living alone was quite an experience, but I don't think I'd want to be doing it ever again. It's always so much easier when you got your parents around to make you the food and stuff..lol:) Currently I live in Hillsborough, Auckland with my parents and sister and here are a few photos of where we live.

I started my Bachelor of Computer Systems Engineering in 2001 at University of Auckland and finished in November 2004. It hasn't even been 3 weeks since I sat my last exam and honestly I can't believe that it's all over now. Doing an engineering degree hasn't been cruisy by any means and I probably wouldn't recommend anyone do engineering if they sort of want to have a social life as well...because it's simply impossible unless you're really really smart and can do projects and stuff about 10 times faster than most people! However it's been a tremendous experience and I was lucky enough to be in a batch full of some nice, friendly, helpful..basically some wonderful people. I've put up some of the uni photos in this album. Somehow or the other I managed to graduate with a First Class and this was our year's Honours list (thought of saving it since it'll be gone from the web by next year and I simply didn't want to lose a pleasant memory).

After graduations I worked for Oscmar International for about 6 months where I was working as a graduate embedded systems development engineer. Basically what the company does is making training simulators for the military for various countries like Australia, US, Norway etc. In simple terms, the military uses laser guns to train their troops who wear the training gear (such as vests and helmets) developed by Oscmar during the training sessions. At the end of the session, the training simulator gives reports etc. on how many times, where, by what weapon and other details the person was hit. The company also develops some gear for vehicles and all these details can be found on the company website. I didn't exactly like doing all low level programming in C and kinda wanted to get away from electronics, so in May 2005 I joined ECONZ as a C++ developer, but ended up getting mainly into Java development. Was working there for about 6 months again and then decided to go back to uni to do postgrad.

I joined the Bioengineering Institute in January 2006 starting my PhD in Modelling Blood Flow in the Gastrointestinal System. During this time I got to goto the US too for a conference for a paper we submitted (US trip photos). Managed to get another publication out of this project titled A model of blood flow in the mesenteric arterial system, but this work was mainly theoretical, so I decided to change after spending nearly a year at the Institute. Decided to get into more of a practical area and currently I'm with Computer Science Department where I'm working on a health informatics type of a project looking at GP prescribing habits and compliance with clinical guidelines. Our group belongs to The National Institute for Health Innovation and is led by Prof. Jim Warren, who's also my supervisor. Have a look at my uni homepage to see what I'm doing there.

Well, that's basically a bit about myself so far. Hope reading my narrative (wonder how many of you actually did!) wasn't too boring for you ;)