Dr. MDP Kumarathunge Senior Lecturer Department of Agricultural Biology, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Ruhuna
	Dr. Dushan Kumarathunge is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Agricultural Biology, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Ruhuna Sri Lanka. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Agriculture (2009) and his Masters in Bio-Statistics (2013) from University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka and PhD in plant ecophysiology and ecosystem modelling (2019) from Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University, Australia. Prior to his current position, he worked as a plant physiologist at the Coconut Research Institute of Sri Lanka. His research mainly focus on understanding how forest trees respond to rising temperature and drought. His aim is to identify the mechanisms of how plant physiological processes such as photosynthesis, growth and reproduction affected by climate warming and water limitation and develop mathematical models to represent those processes in crop and ecosystem models. Research Areas: Temperature response of photosynthesis, plant growth and reproduction, scaling leaf level physiological responses to whole canopy, mechanisms of drought tolerance of palm species