Staff member details
Urban Water and Sanitation Staff members
Lecturer in Substainable Urban Infrastructure Systems
a.pathirana@unesco-ihe.org
+31(0)15-215 1854
Assela Pathirana
Lecturer in Substainable Urban Infrastructure Systems
Resume
Assela Pathirana is a lecturer of Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Systems in the Department of Municipal Urban Infrastructure. He graduated from the faculty of engineering, university of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka in 1995, with first class honors in Civil Engineering, and obtained Masters and Doctoral degrees in Civil Engineering, specializing in hydrology and water resources engineering, from Tokyo University, in 1998 and 2001 respectively.
Assela Pathirana’s Masters Thesis in 1998 was in Hydroinformatics, on the interlinking of distributed watershed models, relational databases and GIS systems for online multi-user information systems.
In his PhD thesis he investigated on the modeling rainfall process based on scaling theories for downscaling applications in watershed and urban drainage scale hydrology. After obtaining his PhD, Assela Pathirana spent two years as a post doctoral fellow at Chuo University, Japan, funded by Japan Society of Promotion of Science (JSPS), where he investigated the use of physically based models for downscaling atmospheric forcing for hydrological applications.
Later he worked as a senior research fellow of the Environment and Sustainable Development programme of United Nations University and later as a research scientist of the International Center for Water Hazard Risk Management (UNESCO-ICHARM), before joining IHE in 2006.
In addition to his training as a specialist in hydrology and water resources engineering, Assela Pathirana has strong background in numerical modeling, parallel computing, database systems, GIS and information and communication technology tools.
His current main research interests are focused on the interactions between urban environment, atmosphere and hydrological cycle, which include: Climate change, Impacts of global dimming on water cycle, scaling issues with special emphasis on translating climatic forcing to drivers of changes in urban/watershed level hydrology, real-time linking of surface hydrology and atmospheric processes.