Prof. Nilanthi de Silva is the Cadre Chair, Senior Professor of the Department of Parasitology, and the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kelaniya. She was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine from 2012 to 2018 and a member of the Internal Quality Assurance Unit of University of Kelaniya since 2005. Later, she served as the Director of the Quality Assurance Council of the University Grants Commission from 2018 to 2020. She was the Vice-President of the Sri Lanka Medical Council from 2016 to 2020. She graduated with an MBBS degree from the University of Colombo in 1986 and went on to obtain a Masters degree in Medical Parasitology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, and MD and Board Certification in Medical Parasitology, from the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo. She was a Commonwealth Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK in 1995/96, and a FAIMER Fellow at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington DC, USA, in 2004/05.

Prof. Nilanthi de Silva is an expert advisor on Neglected Tropical Diseases to the World Health Organization, serving both WHO Headquarters and the Southeast Asia Regional Office in various capacities since 2000. She has served in a similar advisory capacity to other international entities: Children Without Worms at the Task Force for Global Health Atlanta - USA, the Partnership for Child Development at Imperial College London, and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative in Geneva, Switzerland. She is a respected scientist who specializes in soil- transmitted helminth infections, particularly their epidemiology, treatment, and control. She has over one hundred publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, with an h-index of thirty-five. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences of Sri Lanka, has won several Presidential Research Awards, and has been Listed among the World’s Top 2% of Scientists declared by Stanford/Elsevier.