A longer bio

I moved to Canada from Sri Lanka when I was sixteen, in the middle of high school. After finishing my last two years of high school in a new country, I went on to study mathematics at the University of Toronto. At the time, I was still figuring out what kind of work felt meaningful to me. Looking back, it was a roller coaster. For most of that degree I was searching, not arriving: trying to work out who I was and what I actually wanted to do with all of it.

Almost at the very end of my final semester. I did an independent research project with Michela Ippolito, studying the semantics and pragmatics of low-resource languages. Something clicked. For the first time I knew I wanted to spend most of my life doing research.

The timing was almost funny. By then I had already accepted a course-based master's at Northeastern University, in Information Systems with a data science specialization. It could easily have been a detour. Instead it became the turn that mattered. While I was there, Badreldin Omar guided me through research on open-source codebases and code smells, and that was the life-changing point. I found my way back to research from a different direction: software engineering, developer tools, and the human side of code. It gave me both the footing and the conviction to keep going, and to start my PhD in software engineering.

Getting there was not smooth. Near the end of my master's I was applying everywhere at once, to jobs and to PhD programs. I was rejected by nearly six schools and accepted by two. Around the same time, I turned down a data scientist offer at a pharmaceutical company to begin this PhD, choosing the research I am most passionate about. Not every door opened, but the ones that did turned out to be the right ones.

So the path here was never a straight line. That non-linear journey has shaped how I think as a researcher. Moving countries, changing academic systems, and finding research through unexpected opportunities taught me to be adaptable, curious, and persistent. It also taught me that a research path does not always have to be straight to be meaningful. I wouldn't trade the detours. They are the whole reason I know what I want now. I want to do research that is meaningful and connected to real people’s experiences and safety with AI, software, and technology.