Dr. Yumal Kuruppu

Intern Medical Officer
Research Assistant in 2013

Where has your exposure at NIFS taken you?

I have worked as a Junior Research Assistant attached to the Science Education and Dissemination Unit of the NIFS. Apart from refreshing my soul each day with the scenic Hanthana hills, I would like to bring up certain factors which inspired my career pertaining to science, research and the arena of multimedia.

Science grows day by day when we train our eyes to see new horizons, standing on the shoulders of giants in this field. Thus creating that curious mind in successive generations is of outmost importance. The Science Education and Dissemination Unit of NIFS is a platform which fulfills that necessity, led by the perfect personnel capable of understanding the way public will listen and grasp. Together we visited many suburbs within the island, carried out workshops and followed them up, and were rewarded hearing many success stories and collecting memories to cherish. The satisfaction of seeing the science community grow led me to many community projects during my undergraduate career.

A researcher needs to know the art of disseminating the findings where it becomes more productive than a paper or an article, serving a wide range of our own community. I obtained hands on experience on a lot of such tools; broadcasting services, blog sites, Facebook pages, competitions and workshops organized by our team. Not only that it familiarized me to the tools, but taught many soft skills with regard to teamwork, management and creativity.

Multimedia truly was an out of box subject to me when I came to NIFS, although with time I felt how lucky I gained that experience when it came to handling events at University level, producing videos serving medical associations and running effective social media.

I consider it is one of the greatest and rarest opportunities one could possibly have, to work at the premier research institute of Sri Lanka, the NIFS.

Applying science simplifies life