Ishara Paranawithana

I am Ishara Paranawithana, an applied data scientist and a biomedical engineer with over seven years of experience in medical and healthcare fields, passionate about developing medical devices/systems and end-to-end data-driven solutions that can improve people’s quality of life and patient outcomes. 

My expertise in complex real-world data analytics and product development spans a wide range of applications including neurotechnology, medical imaging and surgical robotics. In my previous work, I  have developed solutions for medical and healthcare industry in close collaboration with partners from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Changi General Hospital (CGH) in Singapore.

My PhD work, supervised by A/Prof. Yan Wong, Prof. Colette McKay and Dr. Darren Mao, focused on developing objective measures of brain functional connectivity to understand language development in infants. Importantly, the findings from this work could serve as an important biomarker to gain insights into disease-related dysfunction of language networks in infants with hearing impairment.

I received my bachelor’s degree in electronic and telecommunication engineering from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, in 2016. Upon graduation, I joined Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Singapore, to take a full-time R&D role at Sensing, Actuation and Mechanism (SAM) Design group led by A/Prof. U-Xuan Tan in the pillar of Engineering Product Development (EPD).