NISHADI ERIYAGAMA

Water Resources Engineer

Global Change, Water and Environment Group

Curriculum Vitae

Nishadi Eriyagama has over ten years work experience in water resources and environmental engineering as well as hydrological estimation and analysis. Before joining IWMI, she worked as a civil engineer at Sri Lanka Land Reclamation and Development Corporation (SLLR&DC) for seven and a half years. At SLLR&DC, she carried out extensive work in hydrology and drainage, including computer modeling of drainage basins under road, building and golf course construction projects. In addition, she was also involved in Environmental Impact Assessment studies for several innovative projects in Sri Lanka.

Her Masters research is on improvement of water quality in Colombo drainage canals. Integrated Water Resources Management, Watershed Management, Environmental Hydrology, River Engineering, Water and Waste Water Engineering, Ecological Engineering and Lake Environment Management and also Estuary and Coastal Engineering were some of the key areas in her postgraduate studies. Nishadi joined IWMI in November 2004 as a water resources engineer. At IWMI, she developed tools for estimating water productivity and for classification of areas into crop suitability classes on a global scale - as part of the international initiative known as Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. She is actively involved in IWMI's research on environmental flows, focusing on the development of hydrology-based environmental flow assessment methods and tools, such as global EF-calculator software package. She manages the IWMI drought information web portal. Nishadi is a Chartered Engineer and a corporate member of the Institution of Engineers (IESL), Sri Lanka. She won the award for the best technical paper in the competition conducted by IESL and sponsored by Anton in 2007.