Chamindie Punyadeera

Chamindie Punyadeera is a researcher at Griffith University who was selected to be a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology, Science and Engineering in 2023. She is a researcher in cancer and heart disease, leading a team who uses human saliva and blood as diagnostic tools for detecting heart disease and cancer early.

Early career Punyadeera was born in Sri Lanka, and was raised in Botswana. She received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Botswana, 1994, followed by a Masters of Science in 1996, and a PhD in 2000, both from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Punyadeera plays an editorial role in publications, such as the Journal of Oral Oncology, Pharmacogenomics Research and Personalized Medicine, and serves as an associate editor for BMC Medical Genomics and BMC Cancer.

“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood,” are words that I live by. Spoken by Marie Curie, the Polish physicist and chemist who was the first woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize in Chemistry, a pioneering researcher in radioactivity who conducted her study in appalling conditions." Ovchinnikov, D., Wan, Y., Coman, W., Pandit, P., Cooper-White, J., Herman, J. & Punyadeera, C. (2014). DNA methylation at the novel CpG sites in the promoter of MED15/PCQAP gene as a biomarker for head and neck cancers. Biomarker Insights, 9, 53–60.

Awards

2023 - Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology, Science and Engineering. 2011 - Invited Fellow of the American Nano Society.