Assela Pathirana (1969) is a Civil Engineer and hydrologist originating from Sri Lanka. He holds a Bachelor degree in Civil Engineering, B.Sc.Eng. (First Class Honours) (1995) from the University of Peradeniya Sri Lanka and Masters (1998) and Doctoral (2001) degrees in Civil Engineering, specializing in hydrology and water resources engineering, from Tokyo University. Next, he worked as a senior research fellow of the Environment and Sustainable Development programme of United Nations University and later as a research scientist of the International Centre for Water Hazard Risk Management (UNESCO-ICHARM), before joining IHE-DELFT in year 2006. During the period of two years from 2020, he contributed as Chief Technical Advisor – Water Engineering for the Ministry of Environment of the Maldives and the United Nations Development Programme, contributing to climate adaptation of the water systems of the outer islands of the Maldives.
Assela Pathirana is a Water Management expert with extensive hands-on expertise in hydroinformatics, information technology applications, data analysis and technological innovation in the water sector. Assela completed his master's thesis (1998) titled “Database Centered Hydrological Simulation on the WWW” on the subject that later came to be known as hydroinformatics. In his research, he implemented a prototype web-based information management system for large-scale hydrological data stored in an Oracle-based relational database system. Before entering undergraduate, he contributed to a research program on Malaria Entomology where his computer-based analysis of DNA sequences of Plasmodium falciparum lead to his first publication (Ramasamy R, Pathirana A. Structural Characteristics of Plasmodium falciparum Antigen Repeats Support a Role in Immune Evasion, 1990). In 2001, Assela completed his PhD thesis in urban water management, titled “Fractal modelling of rainfall: downscaling in time and space for hydrological applications” which presented statistical modelling of largescale rain gauge and RADAR-based precipitation over the Japanese archipelago. Between 2001-2003, he completed a post-doctoral research project on the application of physically-based 3D modelling of the atmosphere for precipitation forecasting and RADAR data assimilation.
Assela has 22 years of post-doctoral experience as a researcher, educator (Associate Professor) and in project management environment (Chief Technical Advisor – Water Engineering in UNDP/Maldives). He has published more than 89 peer-reviewed articles which have been cited over 3500 times (currently 500+ citations/year). During the last sixteen years, he has been engaged (several as the principal investigator) in more than thirty-five research and capacity development projects in emerging and emerged economies with funding from different Dutch, European and various International outlets. Since 2014 Assela had been incrementally developing ideas on stakeholder collaboration (e.g. Learning and action alliances) and institutional development in the context of rapid change and deep uncertainty (Agile urban adaptation method). He has applied these in real-world contexts (http://mare-asia.net/category/indonesia/ for LAA, https://goo.gl/4nv8wp for Agile method). In these contexts, he has developed several co-design digital tools that encompass socio-technical aspects of water management that help stakeholders access advanced water solutions in an accessible fashion.
Assela is an advanced-level computer programmer and modelling with expertise in Python, C/C++, Java and many other programming languages. He was introduced to computer programming in 1988 and in 1989 he developed a program to analyse nucleotide sequences database whose results led to his first publication. During the years 1998-2001, he worked (part-time) as a Linux computer system administrator. During his Master's thesis and PhD, he gained extensive experience in computer programming (Java, PL/SQL, Lisp) and applications in the water sector (Web-based applications providing services of hydrological data and models, analysis and modelling of rainfall data). Later he developed the expertise of advanced atmospheric model simulations (MM5, WRF) and their code manipulation (C/C++, FORTRAN), automation (using Bash/Linux scripting) in cluster computing environments as well as analysing and managing large 2D and 3D atmospheric and surface datasets. During the 2006-2021 period, he ventured into the area of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning (Artificial neural networks, Genetic Algorithms, Convolutional neural networks like Tensorflow, cellular-automata, and Natural language processing with social network mining) and their application in flood forecasting/modelling, water system and spatially explicit land-use modelling. During this period he has been training around 10 water professionals per year in advanced modelling and programming (Python and C/C++) within an innovative programme “Modelling Bootcamp” that he introduced as a graduate course. Assela has developed several popular computing libraries (Python) that helps to integrate water simulation models (EPANet, SWMM) for the python programming language. In 2019 he developed expertise in big-data platforms Apache-Spark in python API. He has also implemented crowdsourced data gathering, analysis and web-front-ending, design and integration of massive low-cost water monitoring methods using LoRa/LoRaWAN networking and mobile-based sensors.
Publications
A complete list of publications can be found in Google Scholar.