BG

Bandara Gajanayake

Wayamba University of Sri Lanka - Makandura Campus, Mississippi State University, University of Peradeniya

Research areas: Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Plant Science · Plant Stress Responses and Tolerance · Cocoa and Sweet Potato Agronomy · Climate change impacts on agriculture

ORCID iD 0000-0001-6798-5332
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About

I am a person who committed to build a career in academia. In my personal life I'm quite a simple person following moderate path to shape my life to be happy, successful, and secure. My desire is to contribute my skills and other credentials to become an outstanding teacher and a researcher in the fields of agriculture and higher education. I am planning to accomplish my career goals through my communication, interpersonal, and leadership skills, and my analytical thinking, and problem solving abilities.
I strongly believe with my diverse educational, technical, and research background in agronomy and higher education, I could become an efficient faculty and a researcher. My research interests and experience span a wide range of topics on teaching and research, from crop physiology to general agronomy relating to climate change agriculture. For my PhD research, I have been working on sweetpotato, which is one of the key specialty crops grown in Mississippi and five other states in the USA. More specifically I investigated the effect of four environmental factors namely soil moisture, temperature, UV-b, and elevated carbon dioxide concentration on sweetpotato physiology, growth, development, and storage root yield.
Outcomes of this research will facilitate producers to adjust their planting dates, obtaining better yield, and the researchers to build a model-based decision support system capable of predicting yields, and finally to improve crop productivity both in current and future climatic conditions.
For my MS degree I screened ornamental pepper cultivars for temperature tolerance using pollen, physiological, and seed germination related parameters and for my MPhil degree I investigated the profit efficiencies of tea estates in Sri Lanka.
With my seven years experience on university teaching and the knowledge acquired from the Preparing Future Faculty program from the Mississippi State University I believe I could accomplish my career goals in near future.

Employment

  • Wayamba University of Sri Lanka - Makandura Campus Professor/Visiting Scientist, USDA, ARS-NE, Beltsville, Maryland, USA
    2001 - Present

Education

Projects & Funding

Projects & funding information is unavailable.

Publications (10)