Janaka de Silva

Janaka de Silva FRCP FNASSL is a Sri Lankan physician and academic. He is Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Kelaniya.^[1][2]

Janaka de Silva was educated at Royal College, Colombo and holds degrees from the universities of Colombo and Oxford (Pembroke College).^[3] He had his higher specialist clinical training at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

De Silva was Professor and Chair of Medicine at the University of Kelaniya from 1996-2022. In 1997 he succeeded Carlo Fonseka as Dean of Medicine, a post he held for nine years.^[4] He was also a member of the University Grants Commission from 2008-2011, and Director of the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine (PGIM), University of Colombo from 2014-2020.^[5] Before becoming its Director he chaired a number of boards in the PGIM^[6] where he and colleagues established the first formal training programme for gastroenterologists in Sri Lanka. Together with Kemal Deen and a few others he pioneered setting up of the liver transplant service at the Colombo North Teaching Hospital.^[7]

De Silva’s most influential contributions to research stemmed from his abiding interest in health problems prevalent in Sri Lanka.^[8] He was Chairman of the National Research Council from 2013-2019.^[9] He has held several editorial appointments^[10][11] and served on committees in health and research organizations including the WHO, Wellcome Trust and the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).^{[12][13][14][15][16]}

He was President of the Ceylon College of Physicians in 2004, twenty years after his father, P. T. de Silva.^[17] In addition to several awards and fellowships from academic and professional bodies,^[18][19] de Silva was conferred an honorary DSc by his university, and the national titular honour Vidya Jyothi - Sri Lanka's highest honor for science.^[20][15]