Sri Lanka Tea Board gets new Chairman

16 October 2015 06:30 pm - 1 - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

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Minister of Plantation Industries Navin Dissanayake has appointed Rohan Pethiyagoda as the new Chairman of Sri Lanka Tea Board.

Rohan Pethiyagoda, a Sri Lankan businessman and a distinguished officer of the Government Service, whose immediate prior assignment has been Consultant to the Ministry of Tourism and Sports, is being now appointed to the Tea Board with effect from 19th October.

Pethiyagoda completed his secondary education at St Thomas’s College, Mount Lavinia and B.Sc. (Eng.) Hons. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, at King’s College, University of London in 1977. He also completed his M.Phil. in Biomedical Engineering, University of Sussex 1980.

Pethiyagoda served as an engineer in the Division of Biomedical Engineering of the Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka, from 1981-82 and from 1982-87 he serves as Director of that institution.

In 1984, he was concurrently appointed chairman of Sri Lanka’s Water Resources Board and resigned from government office in 1987 to commence work on a project to explore the island’s freshwater fishes, which led to his first book, Freshwater fishes of Sri Lanka (1990), a richly-illustrated account of the country’s freshwater-fish fauna.

Sri Lanka Tea
In 1998, concerned by the rapid loss of mountain forest in Sri Lanka, Pethiyagoda began a (still on-going) project to convert abandoned tea plantations into natural forest, for which he was honoured by the Rolex Awards for Enterprise.

In recognition of his contribution to biodiversity conservation Pethiyagoda, a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, served as Advisor on Environment and Natural resources to the Government of Sri Lanka from 2002–2004 and was in 2005 elected Deputy Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission.

In 2008 Pethiyagoda was elected to the board of trustees of the International Trust for Zoological Nomenclature, having previously served a four-year term as Deputy Chair of the Assurance Group of the British American Tobacco Biodiversity Partnership.

In addition to some 60 papers in the scientific literature, his most recently published books are on the history of natural-history exploration in Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan primates and Horton Plains National Park. He is a Research Associate of the Australian Museum and serves as editor for Asian Freshwater Fishes of the journal Zootaxa. Several new species have been named in his honour, including the fishes Dawkinsia rohani and Rasboroides rohani; the dragon lizard Calotes pethiyagodai; the jumping spider Onomastus pethiyagodai and the dragonfly Macromidia donaldi pethiyagodai.

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Comments - 1

gamini samarasinghe Saturday, 17 October 2015 05:09 PM

Congratulations.gs

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Sri Lanka Tea Board gets new Chairman

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