Sarath Gunapala

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Sarath Gunapala, is a Sri Lankan solid-state physicist, Chief Scientist and Group Supervisor of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's QWIP Program and also a Board Member of QWIP Technologies LLC.

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[edit] Early life

Dr. Gunapala set his mind on being an astronomer or space scientist when he was a schoolboy, being motivated by a lecture given by veteran scientist Prof. Cyril Ponnamperuma and articles that appeared in Nawayugaya magazine. He received his primary & secondary education at Nalanda College Colombo, and entered the University of Colombo in 1975 and passed his special degree in physics with a first class in 1979. After a short period of working as an assistant lecturer at the same university, he was offered a scholarship to USA for his doctorate. Then he joined Bell Laboratories which was founded by Alexander Grahambell-inventor of the telephone. He worked there as a scientist for seven years. While working for Bell Laboratories, he developed an IR detector which was capable of attracting the minds at NASA. They invited him to work at NASA, something that had been this Sri Lankans dream since he was just a kid. Since then, for the past 15 years, Dr. Gunapala has been working at JPL-NASA.

[edit] QWIP technology

"This technology will revolutionize the way we develop new remote sensing instruments," said team leader Dr. Sarath Gunapala and added; "As a result of all our research work in last decade, QWIP technology has culminated as the most favorable highly sensitive multi-band large format focal plane array technology in long-wavelength infrared region. "

Dr. Gunapala has introduced to the world, the "640x512 PixZls Long-Wavelength Infrared (LWIR) Quantum Dot Infrared Photodetector (QDIP) Focal Plane Array Camera".

[edit] Publications

[edit] References

[edit] See also