Board of Directors

Mr. Manilka Fernando is a banking and finance professional who has over 40 years of experience, working in financial institutions and other organizations in Sri Lanka and overseas.  He has an MBA degree from the University of Georgia, USA. He is also a Fellow member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and Certified Management Accountants of Australia. He has completed executive development programs at Harvard University and INSEAD.

He is currently the Chairman of Ceybank Asset Management Ltd. and has held Non-Executive Director positions at several organizations including Bank of Ceylon, Laugfs Group, Pership Group, Softlogic Group, and other organizations.

He has held senior management positions in the financial services sector at Citibank, NDB Bank, Mashreq Bank (Dubai, UAE) and Al Rajhi Bank (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia). In addition, he has carried out management consulting/advisory projects at a range of organizations. He has been a lecturer in strategic management and finance at the University of Colombo, Institute of Chartered Accountants, and other institutions.

Mr. Irshad Halaldeen works as an independent HR consultant and is also a Director in Co-Energi Pvt Ltd., an energy consulting & engineering firm that promotes energy efficiency and conservation among Sri Lankan and regional
businesses. He has more than 25 years of senior management experience in local public listed and foreign
institutions. He has served as the Vice President HR & Organization Development at Amana Bank PLC, Head of Talent
Management at Al-Rajhi Bank, Saudi Arabia and prior to that as Group HR Director at Hemas Holdings PLC where he
also served in the Group Management Committee among others. His areas of specialization within the field of HR are Strategic Change Management, Talent Management and Organization Development. He obtained his MSc in Industrial Management specializing in Organizational Development from the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology, Trondheim Norway.

Mr. Patrick Vandenbruaene is a Belgian national with over 38 years of experience in Sri Lanka. He, till mid 2024, headed the Development Partners Secretariat, an office supporting the coordination of over 40 foreign aid missions operating in the country. He previously worked for 12 years in a similar capacity as Development Partners’ Senior Coordination Officer, contracted by the World Bank. Prior to that he served for 8 years as Humanitarian Adviser to several UN Resident Coordinators. Further to his UN work within Sri Lanka, he also supported the UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) preparation process for the Philippines and for Rwanda. Other experience includes consultancy work for the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs – UNDESA. He also acted as Sri Lanka’s Post-tsunami UN Emergency Adviser in the Centre for National Operations (CNO), established within the Presidential Secretariat in the aftermath of the disaster. Previous work includes a 5-year period as Coordinator to Save the Children Fund (UK) Relief and Rehabilitation Program in war areas and 5 years as Project Director to the Integrated Fisheries Development Center (IFDC) in and around Negombo, supporting poor fishing communities. Early experience includes voluntary work in Tunisia, India, Thailand, Kenya and Madagascar. His academic qualifications include an Engineering – Master equivalent degree in Agriculture and Rural Development from the Universite du Travail, Tournai, Belgium and a Tropical Agriculture Undergraduate degree from the Haute Ecole Provinciale du Hainaut – Ath, Belgium.

Ms Shyamali Ranaraja is an Attorney-at-law and holds a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from the University of Colombo and is presently reading for a PhD at the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Colombo.

She is a practitioner in Employment and Labour Law, and a Human Resources Management Consultant since April 1998. She is currently a visiting lecturer and examiner at the University of Peradeniya; Department of Human Resources Management, Department of Law, and a visiting lecturer in the Master’s Degree in Business Administration. She also carries out consultancies for varying clients, such as the Asia Foundation, International Labour Organisation, World Bank and European Union among others

Ms. Ranaraja is the President, Alliance Française de Kandy, and a member of the Board of Trustees to administer and manage the paintings and artifacts donated the University of Peradeniya by the late Ian Goonetilake, and his wife, Roslin.

Sasanka Perera  is Chairman of Colombo Institute for Human Sciences and Director at Tambapanni Academic Publications.  He was the founding professor of sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi from 2011 until his retirement in July 2024. He was Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences from 2011– 2018 and 2021-2022 and South Asian University’s Vice President from 2016 to 2019. {rior to that he taught at University of Colombo for 19 years.

Trained as a cultural anthropologist, in his teaching career, he has straddled subject areas that are considered both sociology and anthropology. His research interests are varied and have evolved over the years. It spans cultural and political analysis, education, language politics, visual cultures, urban space and migration. Broadly speaking, his main interest lies in contemporary social theory with an emphasis on the idea of culture and its politics. He has written extensively and published both locally and internationally in the English and Sinhala languages.

His publications in English include Fear of the Visual? Photography, Anthropology and the Anxieties of Seeing (2020); Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise (2016); and Violence and The Burden of Memory: Remembrance and Erasure in Sinhala Consciousness (2015). He has co-written Against the Nation: Thinking Like South Asians (2019) and co-edited Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter, and Politics in Unstable Times (2022); Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds (2019) and Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices (2018). In addition, he has also translated into Sinhala Jostein Gaarder’s short novel, Vita Brevis: A Letter to St Augustine (2019) and Hisashi Inoue’s play Face of Jizo (2016) and has co-translated a collection of poems by Jalal Al-din Rumi to Sinhala (2022). His poetry collection in Sinhala, සොයමින් අදිසි මොහොතක් (In Search of an Invisible Moment) was published in 2024.

Nayana Mawilmada is currently President – John Keells Property Group, the real estate development arm of John Keells Holdings and has been heading this cluster since 2017. He has a  Bachelor of Architecture degree from Hampton University USA, and a masters degree in City Planning  with emphasis on International Development  and Regional Planning from MIT.  He also has an MBA from the Harvard Business School.  Prior to this, he was the Head of Investments in the Western Region Megapolis Planning Project, Sri Lanka from May 2016 – June 2017. He was also the Director General – of the Urban Development Authority (UDA) Sri Lanka from January 2015 to April 2016.

Among the many prestigious international positions, he has held, his tenures at the Asian Development Bank Manila as  Urban Development Specialist from 2001 – 2007, and Strategic Planning Specialist/Team Leader (Independent International Consultant) 2009-2011 are noteworthy.  Nayana was involved in developing Sri Lanka’s first National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy, covering all key sectors in the economy and engaging 500+ stakeholders —among the most comprehensive such efforts in Asia.

Professor Camena Gunaratne is an Attorney-at-Law and holds an LLB from the University of Colombo, LLM from Harvard Law School and a PhD from the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She is currently a Professor at the Department of Legal Studies, Open University of Sri Lanka, with prior experience as the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Head of the Inter-Faculty Environmental Studies Unit and Head of the Department of Legal Studies. She was a Smuts Visiting Scholar in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fulbright scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is currently a member of the Incorporated Council of Legal Education and was previously on the Law Commission and the National Committee on Women. She has several years of experience writing and contributing to books, monographs, essays, book chapters and journal articles.