Top engineer to talk on education to innovation and commercialisation tomorrow

Monday, 17 February 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Top and award winning Lankan engineer and inventor Nihal Kularatna will make a presentation on ‘Education to Innovation and Commercialisation’ on 18 February from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Institute of Engineers Sri Lanka Auditorium, Colombo 7. The presentation is organised by the Sri Lanka Investors Commission and is targeted at University student inventors, senior inventors, private and public sector personnel.

Kularatna in his presentation will share three classic examples in the areas of energy saving, lightning and surge protection, and environment to show how simple engineering gets extended into details with a commercial flavour, while adopting new devices and technologies. Kularatna is an electronics engineer with over 36 years of experience in industry and research. After 10 years of employment in the aviation and telecommunications industries, he joined the Arthur C Clarke institute for Modern Technologies in Sri Lanka as an R&D engineer in 1985 and he was appointed the CEO of the institute in 1999. From 2002 to 2005 he was a senior lecturer in the Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Auckland, New Zealand and he is currently with the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. He is currently contracted for a new book titled ‘Energy Storage Devices, Rechargeable Batteries, Supercapacitors and Their Applications’ by Elsevier, USA. He acts as a reviewer for several learned society publications by IEEE and IET. A Fellow of the IET (London), Senior Member of IEEE (USA) and a Member of IPENZ he is currently active in research in supercapacitor applications, transient propagation and power conditioning areas and smart sensor systems. For his commercially oriented research work, one US patent was granted and several more patents are pending. He was the winner of New Zealand Engineering Innovator of the Year Award for 2013. After work he enjoys gardening and car grooming.