Professor Carukshi Arambepola

Professor Carukshi Arambepola is a professor and a board certified specialist in community medicine. She graduated from the University of Colombo with MBBS second class honours and pursued a career in community medicine. She was awarded the gold medal for best performance at MSc in Community Medicine in 2000.

Her research interests have been in the field of epidemiology of non-communicable diseases with a public health perspective. Her MD thesis in 2004 was on abdominal obesity and its relationship with cardiovascular disease risk. During her overseas training in the department of public health at the University of Oxford, she researched into nutrient profiling and validation of models to assess healthiness of diet.

Professor Carukshi was awarded a commonwealth fellowship in 2014 to explore novel technology enabled approaches in lifestyle modification. Her unique contribution to NCD research was as the sole corresponding member representing Sri Lanka and co-author in the 2008-2010 Global Burden of Disease Project to produce comprehensive estimates of nutrient estimates. She has been the recipient of NRC President’s award for excellence in research on 10 consecutive years and 3 NRC merit awards. She has also received Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research awarded by the University of Colombo – 2017.

She has presented her work in abstract form in over 150 scientific conferences and won many international and national awards/prizes. She is the co-editor of the journal of College of Community Physicians of Sri Lanka.

She has supervised 13 PhD, MPhil and MD theses and is a resource person in applied research in higher education institutions, and has been the coordinator of the student research program of the faculty since 2008. She has published 60 original research articles in SC indexed journals. She has 4517 citations and an H index of 26.