I obtained my Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (M.B.B.S) from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka in 2008. After serving several years as a medical officer in the health sector, I joined the University of Peradeniya in 2013 as a probationary lecturer in Anatomy.
I completed the Master of Philosophy (M.Phil), titled ´clinical and immunological characterization and evaluation of therapeutic response in rheumatoid arthritis´, under the supervision of Prof. Ajith Sominanda, Prof. Chandrika Jayasinghe and Dr. Jayampathy Dissanayake in 2017. As the Masters project, I recruited and followed up a cohort of newly diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis patients and characterized them in terms of a defined set of clinical and immunological parameters. How the disease activity of rheumatoid arthritis, as measured by clinical markers, correlates with the peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) that produce TNFα, IL 1β, IL 10 and IL 17α were quantified in order to assess the potential candidacy of one or several of these 4 cytokines as a biomarker/biomarkers of disease activity in rheumatoid arthritis.
Currently, I pursue my doctoral studies (Ph.D.) at the Institute of Biomedicine and Translational Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Tartu, under the supervision of Prof. Alireza Fazeli. As the doctoral project, I characterize the extracellular vesicles (EVs) released by pre-implantation bovine embryos which would pave the way for future studies on EVs as a mode of embryo-maternal communication.
e-mail: keerthie.dissanayake@ut.ee
