Gayani Senevirathne, a young Sri Lankan-born scientist, is gaining prominence in the scientific community in the United States for her recent research finding answers to a human abnormality.  

Dr. Senevirathne’s doctorate work, where she found a gene in frog development that could be used to answer an abnormality found in the axial column of human babies before birth, has been published in a high-ranked journal called Proceedings of the National Sciences.

A graduate of Sri Lanka’s Mahamaya Girls’ College in Kandy, with a specialization in Zoology and Molecular Biology, Senevirathne entered the Science Faculty of the University of Peradeniya in 2009. She also received two Presidential awards in Sri Lanka and an award for the Best Science Research from Sri Lanka Research Institute for her research.

Later she completed her doctoral studies at the University of Chicago in the US and later worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. 
 
She hopes to return to Sri Lanka and help girls there in science to achieve their dreams, reported Daily Mirror. She further said that her greatest desire in life was to run her own laboratory, to build an environment where everyone was accepted, to empower females and minorities, and to address scientific research questions in vertebrate evolution using cutting-edge techniques.
 
(SAM)