Rate My Professor Nishan Dharmaweera

Dr. Nishan Dharmaweera serves as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, a position he assumed on November 20, 2023, following his role as Acting Dean. Prior to this, he was appointed Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 2022 and joined the department as a Senior Lecturer in October 2016. He earned his B.Eng. (Hons) in Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering with First Class Honours from Monash University, Australia, in September 2009, and completed his PhD in Telecommunications Engineering at the same university in 2014. Between 2015 and 2016, he conducted postdoctoral research at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, focusing on advanced optical networking technologies.

Dr. Dharmaweera's research centers on telecommunications engineering, with a specialization in optical communications and networking. His work addresses critical challenges such as impairment-aware resource allocation, regenerator allocation in nonlinear flexible-grid optical networks, traffic-grooming and multipath-routing in elastic optical networks, nonlinear impairments and crosstalk in multicore-fiber-based flexgrid networks, and power-efficient backbone networks. He has published extensively in leading journals, including 'Towards a power-efficient backbone network: The state of research' in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (2015), 'Traffic-Grooming- and Multipath-Routing-Enabled Impairment-Aware Elastic Optical Networks' in Journal of Optical Communications and Networking (2016), 'Joint assignment of power, routing, and spectrum in static flexible-grid networks' in Journal of Lightwave Technology (2017), and 'Robust Regenerator Allocation in Nonlinear Flexible-Grid Optical Networks with Time-Varying Data Rates' in Journal of Optical Communications and Networking (2018). As principal investigator, he has secured major grants, including Rs. 1,500,000 from the National Research Council Sri Lanka for designing next-generation fiber optic national backbone networks (2018), SKR 10,000,000 from the Swedish Research Council for adaptive optical networks (2012), and RM 80,000 from the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia for modeling power consumption in optical circuit-switched networks (2010). His contributions have advanced system optimization and energy efficiency in optical infrastructures, evidenced by highly cited publications.