Gayandi Ekanayake

PhD student, Institute of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Sciences, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tartu, Estonia

Gayandi Ekanayake has started her scientific career in the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka where she received her BSc (Honors) degree majoring Botany (Plant Sciences) and MSc degree in Crop Protection and Plant Biotechnology in 2018 and 2020 respectively. During her Master’s studies, she worked as a research assistant for two India-Sri Lanka collaborative research projects namely,  “High throughput genotyping to expedite the genetic characterization and dissection of important agronomic traits of tea”  and “Genetic analysis of plant pigments of tea (Camellia sinenisis L.)” conducted by the Tea Research Institute of Sri Lanka. After being employed as a specialist at the Institute of Biomedicine and Translational Medicine, University of Tartu for a short period of time, she joined the Estonian University of Life Sciences as a doctoral student in 2021 for a joint PhD project between the ERA Chair of COMBIVET and the ERA Chair of VALORTECH under the supervision of  Prof Alireza Fazeli and Prof Rajeev Bhat. Her doctoral studies are focused on purification and characterization of extracellular vesicles (EVs) from plant waste materials and their by-products, specifically from fruits and vegetable wastes as a novel approach for the valorisation of fruit and vegetable wastes.

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