Dula Amarasiriwardena, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, Receives Fulbright Specialist Award to Teach in Chile

The U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board recently announced that Dulasiri (Dula) Amarasiriwardena, who taught at Hampshire from 1998 to 2021, received a Fulbright Specialist Program award. As a Fulbright Specialist, he will complete a project within the faculty of the Department of Chemical Sciences at the Universidad de Concepción, in Chile.

For undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, Amarasiriwardena will present Analytical Chemistry Applied to Environmental Monitoring and Exposure and offer project-based environmental and analytical chemistry laboratories with examples of successful project labs. He will also engage with Chilean graduate and undergraduate students through mentorship, advising, and collaborative research projects, helping with research methodologies, data analysis, and interpretation.

At the National Meeting on Analytical and Environmental Chemistry, Amarasiriwardena will deliver a talk titled “The Bad and the Ugly: Investigation of Exposure to Geogenic Arsenic and Lithium by Ancient Andeans Using Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS),” based on a decade’s worth of work with Hampshire students.

In Chile, he will promote Hampshire’s pedagogy: interdisciplinary education, encouraging students to think critically and approach challenges from multiple perspectives. He hopes to build lasting scientific and cultural relationships between the two nations.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to build connections between the people of the United States and those of other countries. Recipients of Fulbright Specialist awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, demonstrated leadership in their field, and their potential to foster long-term cooperation between institutions in the United States and abroad.

Since its establishment, in 1946, the Fulbright Program has given more than 400,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, and scientists the opportunity to study, teach, conduct research, exchange ideas, and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.