Premala Sivaprakasapillai Sivasegaram

Premala Sivaprakasapillai Sivasegaram (née Sivaprakasapillai; ; born 22 April 1942) is a Sri Lankan engineer. She is the country’s first female engineer and the first female civil engineer. She is also one of the prominent members of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka.

Early life and education Premala Sivaprakasapillai was born on 22 April 1942 in Jaffna Fort in her maternal granduncle’s District Judge quarters. Her father Thambyapillai Sivaprakasapillai was an engineer who worked at the Colombo Port. Her family had lived in Colombo but were forced to move back to their hometown, Jaffna, following the bombing on Colombo Port by the Japanese in 1942 on the eve of Easter Sunday, just days before her birth. The family later returned to Colombo. She then entered the engineering faculty at the University of Ceylon in 1960. After graduating she was appointed as an instructor in the engineering faculty at the university. Her family, particularly her father, were very supportive of her education and career, to the extent of discouraging her marriage until she had completed her education. She was one of nine international women technologists awarded a Caroline Haslett Memorial Fund bursary to assist their attending the conference.

During her time in Britain, she married Sivasegaram

In March 2019, she was acknowledged as one of twelve female change-makers in Sri Lanka by the parliament, coinciding with International Women's Day. She commented that “I really enjoyed what I was doing, and I was totally immersed in it. I never said no if I had to do something that normally women don’t have to do; like climbing a high ladder for the first time, I did it without a murmur because you know otherwise they would have said that’s a reason why women should not take up engineering ...Women have a different point of view, the way they use the roads, the public transport and even women’s reaction to drugs, medicines, the way the symptoms show. It is usually quite different, so you need to include women in all activities”. and edited their quarterly journal Engineer from 1977 to 1980. In 2000, she was elected Honorary Fellow of the Society of Structural Engineers, Sri Lanka.