Manju Dissanayake PhD

Dr. Manju Dissanayake, a lead data scientist at BioXcelerate, started his career with an undergraduate degree in medical microbiology at the University of Edinburgh but quickly shifted to computer science due to his strong interest. He completed a PhD at Heriot-Watt University, specializing in machine learning, particularly in feature selection and classification within large biological datasets using Evolutionary Algorithms.

During his academic pursuits, Manju showcased his computer science skills by contributing to a startup that developed the innovative Ten Thumbs typing tutor program. This program introduced features like graphically guided tutoring, auto-generated natural text, and interactive games to enhance the learning experience.

Simultaneously, Manju joined the EU FP7 project ORIGIN as a research associate, where he explored cutting-edge research areas such as accurate local weather forecasting using big data, renewable energy prediction, smart electric car charging, and the use of electric car batteries for energy storage.

His professional journey continued with a role at Adobe, where he was part of a core engineering team responsible for handling millions of daily requests through Adobe’s APIs. He specialized in constructing secure and fault-tolerant distributed systems on the cloud.

Manju then ventured into the financial services industry, gaining experience in both large finance institutions like Tesco Bank (UK) and fintech startups such as Hubpay (Dubai). He became well-versed in the full data science lifecycle and infrastructure, including data science platform development and model deployment.

In August 2022, Manju joined BioXcelerate, where he deepened his expertise in in-house algorithms. His work focuses on improving algorithm computational efficiency and optimization using evolutionary algorithms.