Prof. Vajira H.W. Dissanayake
Chairman
E-mail: vajira.dissanayake@cwcdh.org
Prof. Dissanayake is the Chair Professor of Anatomy Genetics and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. He was one of the founders of the Health Informatics Society of Sri Lanka (HISSL) in 1998 and its President since 2009. He founded the Biomedical and Health Informatics Programme in the University of Colombo in 2008. This programme offers a MSc in Biomedical Informatics and a MD in Health Informatics leading to specialist board citification in Health Informatics making Sri Lanka the only country in the world to recognise Health Informatics as a medical specialization. As of April 2018 the programme had produced 127 MSc graduates. There are 61 MSc and 39 MD students in training. In 2016 he founded the Commonwealth Digital Health Initiative as the flagship project of his Presidency of the Commonwealth Medical Association that resulted in the establishment of the Commonwealth Centre for Digital Health in London in 2018. He is a Working Council Member of the Asia eHealth Information Network, the President Elect of the Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics, HISSL’s representative to the International Medical Informatics Association and a member of the Guidelines Development Group for Digital Health of the World Health Organization. Professor Dissanayake was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences of Sri Lanka in 2013.