Dr Aruna Dharshan De Silva is currently Head of the Biomedical Lab-2 and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Paraclinical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, General Sir John Kotelawala Defense University (KDU), Sri Lanka. In addition, he holds an Adjunct Associate Professor position at the La Jolla Institute of Allergy & Immunology, California, USA. He serves as a visiting lecturer in Immunology at IBMBB, University of Colombo.
He is currently the Chairman of the Working committee on Biotechnology at the National Science Foundation, Sri Lanka.
Dr De Silva was the former Director of KDU-CARE from 2017 Nov, till Nov 2019. Before that he was the Director and Senior Scientist at the Genetech Research Institute from 2008 to 2017.
Dr De Silva obtained his PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, USA (2000). He has over 10 years of overseas experience working at top –level infectious disease and immunology laboratories and has over 60 international publications.
He has run research labs in Sri Lanka over the last 12 years and conducts research with grants from foreign and local funding agencies to study Dengue, COVID-19, Tuberculosis & the rare disease Melioidosis.