THE LAB
We are a group of nerds heavily invested in science and trying too hard to act cool. We code, we align, we measure, and we do it over and over again.
DUSHAN WADDUWAGE / THE PI
Dushan is a John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow in Imaging at Harvard’s Center for Advanced Imaging. He is the principal investigator of Wadduwage Lab. Broadly trained in biomedical optics, computer science, and electronic engineering, Dushan works at the intersection of optics, machine learning, and biology to develop new computational imaging systems and algorithms.
Before joining Harvard, he briefly worked at the MIT Laser Biomedical Research Center (LBRC) with Professor Peter So. Prior to his PhD, he worked as a lecturer and instructor in the department of Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.
In his free time, Dushan likes to fanatically binge-watch, terribly paint, and nomadically travel.
EDUCATION:
PhD, NUS (Singapore-MIT Alliance Graduate Fellowship)
Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore (NUS)
School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University
Department of Biological Engineering, MIT
B.Sc, Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering
University of Moratuwa (UOM), Sri Lanka
ART THOU ART ?
EVERYTHING
OPTICS
JIAN ZHAO / JOINT POSTDOC
Dr. Jian Zhao is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Picower Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining the Picower Institute, Dr. Zhao was a postdoctoral associate affiliated with the Boston University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his PhD degree in optics and photonics from CREOL, the College of Optics and Photonics at the University of Central Florida. Previously, he obtained his B.S. degree in optics from the School of Physics and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, China. His research interests include label-free computational chemical microscopy, mid-infrared photothermal microscopy, multiphoton microscopy, deep learning applications in optics, micro-structured fiber optics, and ultrafast optics. Dr. Zhao is a member of SPIE and OSA.
EDUCATION:
PhD, CREOL - the College of Optics and Photonics
University of Central Florida
BS, School of Physics and Engineering
Sun Yat-sen University, China
NON-LINEAR
CRICKET
HASINDU PIYUMANTHA / POSTBAC
Hasindu is a Post-Bac Fellow affiliated with Wadduwage lab. At Wadduwage lab, he is working on modeling and training learnable optical systems taking fabrication constraints and noise into consideration. He is also working on modeling optical non-linear activations for learnable optical systems to increase their performance. He is interested in physics-based machine learning, mathematical modeling, computational imaging, optical neural networks, deep learning, and signal processing.
Before joining Wadduwage lab, Hasindu completed his B.Sc. in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. He also worked as a Visiting Researcher (Student) at the School of Computer Science, University of Sydney.
In his free time, Hasindu likes to watch movies and travel. Despite being a terrible player, he enjoys playing cricket and chess.
EDUCATION:
B.Sc, Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering
University of Moratuwa (UOM), Sri Lanka
ROOK ENDINGS
UDITH HAPUTHANTHRI / POSTBAC
Udith Haputhanthri is a Post-Baccalaureate Fellow affiliated with Wadduwage Lab, Center for Advanced Imaging at Harvard University. He works at the intersection of microscopy and deep learning/computer vision and biology-inspired artificial intelligence (AI).
In his recent work, he and his colleagues have been developing a ~x100 faster quantitative phase microscopy using learnable optics and computer vision. The proposed optical setup selectively extracts important features from the phase distribution of the light field that comes from a biological specimen (through diffractive deep neural networks). A conventional photodetector array then captures the extracted feature representations. Finally, super-resolution algorithms reconstruct the phase distribution of the input field. In parallel, he has been exploring neuroscience/ cognitive science/ biology-inspired AI. His goal is to understand how biological brains learn and use those insights to improve AI. He is currently working on biology-inspired optimization algorithms to optimize non-overparameterized neural networks.
He received his B.Sc. degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka 2022 (1st class, cGPA: 4.00/ 4.20). Prior to joining as a post-baccalaureate fellow at Harvard, he worked at the same lab as a Visiting Undergraduate Research Fellow (Remote) in 2021/ 2022. He designed a fully differentiable computational optical model for fluorescence microscopy. The proposed computational model allows high-throughput imaging by learning content and task-aware illumination patterns.
He has also been working (part-time) as a machine learning/computer vision researcher in the Biomedical Research and Innovative Collective (theBRIC) at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, and The AI Team. He completed his internship in Acceler Logic, where he contributed to develop 5-bit neural network quantization algorithms for high-throughput analog hardware. The project was outsourced by Analog-Inference, California, USA.
Udith was a chess player who loved rook endings and is an acoustic guitarist who skipped music classes. In addition, he has been learning piano at a snail's pace and he loves free-style wrestling.
EDUCATION:
B.Sc, Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering
University of Moratuwa (UOM), Sri Lanka
MITHUNJHA ANANDAKUMAR / JOINT POSTBAC
Mithunjha Anandakumar is a Joint Post Baccalaureate Fellow affiliated with Wadduwage Lab and SO Lab in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. She completed her bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Her research interests are developing artificial intelligence methods for medicine and healthcare, with a focus on advancing medical imaging through machine learning. Mithunjha currently works at the intersection of machine learning, computational imaging, and computational biology at Harvard.
Mithunjha has focused her undergraduate thesis on developing an interpretable multi-modal sleep staging algorithm using ear EEG and EOG. She also has worked as a trainee associate research engineer at Zone24x7 Advanced research center, which is a collaboration between Zone24x7 Inc., San Jose, USA, and the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.
In her free time, you can find her curled up with good series and a pair of headphones, lost in the world of sound and story.
EDUCATION:
B.Sc, Biomedical Engineering
University of Moratuwa (UOM), Sri Lanka
DALL-E
JATHURSHAN PRADEEPKUMAR / JOINT POSTBAC
Jathurshan is a Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at Harvard’s Center for Advanced Imaging. He works on computational imaging and biology research with Dr. Dushan Wadduwage and Dr. Sergey Ovchinnikov. His interests lie at the nexus of machine learning and oncology, particularly in developing interpretable and robust machine learning methods to enable new discoveries to accelerate our battle against cancer.
Before Harvard, He completed his bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, and his thesis project focused on developing an interpretable sleep staging algorithm using cross-modal transformers. During his senior year as a remote undergraduate researcher, he contributed to Harvard-MIT collaborative research by developing a forward model agnostic reconstruction algorithm for structured illuminated microscopy (SIM). Also, he completed his remote research internship at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
During his free time, Jathurshan likes to follow Formula 1, get addicted to games, travel, and practice karate.
EDUCATION:
B.Sc, Biomedical Engineering
University of Moratuwa (UOM), Sri Lanka
FORMULA
1
SINGING SENSATION
RAMITH HETTIARACHCHI / JOINT POSTBAC
Ramith is a Joint Post-Bac Fellow affiliated to Wadduwage Lab and So Lab in the Division of Science at Harvard University. As a Post-Bac Fellow at Wadduwage Lab, he is working on making learnable optical systems robust and realizable by factoring in practical considerations such as fabrication constraints. His research interests include using machine learning for scientific discovery and focusing on the robustness, interpretability, and equitability of machine learning algorithms.
He completed his B.Sc. degree from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka in Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering. As part of his undergraduate studies, Ramith completed his internship at the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group at CSIRO Data 61, Australia. In 2018, he co-founded a startup, The A.I. Team (Private) Ltd, which won the Best Client Delivery Innovation at SLASSCOM National Ingenuity Awards 2021, Sri Lanka.
While Ramith thinks he's a singing sensation, usually, the audience politely disagrees. They give him a round of applause for his enthusiasm, but it's clear they're not asking for an encore.
EDUCATION:
B.Sc, Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering
University of Moratuwa (UOM), Sri Lanka