[June 17, 2004] The Sangam is proud to announce that Dr. Indira V. Samarasekera has been appointed vice president research at the University of British Columbia. She has been a professor in the Department of Metals and Materials Engineering and the Centre for Metallurgical Process Engineering at the University of British Columbia since 1980.
Dr. Samarasekara was born Indira Arulpragasaham.
Dr. Samarasekera’s expertise in heat transfer and stress analysis has led her to research a number of processes with a major emphasis on the continuous casting and hot rolling of steel, and the growth of single crystals for electronic devices. To facilitate knowledge-transfer to industry, Dr. Samarasekera has participated in short courses on the continuous casting of steel at companies in North and South America, Europe, Asia and South Africa. She was the first incumbent of the Dofasco Chair in Advanced Steel Processing at UBC. Dr. Samarasekera has received the Killam Prize and the McDowell Medal from the University of British Columbia for research excellence. In 1991 she was awarded an E.W.R. Steacie Fellowship by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the B.C. Science Council Award for New Frontiers in Research in 1997. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and of CIMM. In 2002 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada
Dr. Samarasekera currently serves on the Board of Directors of Discovery Parks Inc., The Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, Genome British Columbia, and the Provincial Health Services Authority, and has recently been invited to join the CBIN Board of Directors. She has served as a member of Council of the National Research Council of Canada, the Board of the Children and Women’s Health Centre of BC, the BC Research Institute for Children and Women’s Health and Aquanet-NCE. Dr. Samarasekera also served as president of the Metallurgical Society of CIM for a year and was on the board for six years. She was student affairs director for The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society of AIME in the U.S.
Dr. Samarasekera obtained a B.Sc. Honours degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Ceylon in 1974. She spent the following year as a mechanical engineer at the Refinery of the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation and then proceeded to the United States of America as a Hays-Fulbright Scholar, obtaining a M.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California in 1976. She completed a doctorate degree at the University of British Columbia in 1980 under the supervision of Professor J. Keith Brimacombe, O.C.