Shyaman Jayasundara

PhD Student (Computer Science) and Graduate Research Assistant | B.Sc. Eng (Hons)

E-mail contact@shyaman.me

I'm a passionate data science enthusiast with a keen interest in bioinformatics and computational biology. Beyond the world of data, I find joy in exploring new places and capturing precious moments with my loved ones.

Experience 

Research Assistant

Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA
Supervisor: Prof. Majid Kazemian
Aug 2022 - Now

Research Assistant (Full-time)

Agricultural Biotechnology Centre, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
Supervisor: Professor Pradeepa Bandaranayake
Aug 2020 - April 2022

Research Assistant (Part-time)

Department of Computer Engineering, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
Supervisor: Dr. Damayanthi Herath
Oct 2021 - Dec 2021

Research Volunteer (Full-time)

Agricultural Biotechnology Centre, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
Supervisor: Professor Pradeepa Bandaranayake

Next-Generation Sequencing(NGS) methods like Illumina have made it possible to sequence DNAs with high throughput at an affordable cost. The total DNA of Eukaryotic is consists of the chloroplast, mitochondrial and nuclear reads. Though many works have used chloroplast data, the remaining mitochondrial and nuclear data have been left untouched. Thus we aimed to utilize mitochondrial and nuclear data to identify species-level differences among cinnamon species.

Dec 2019 - Jan 2020

Research Assistant (Internship)

Montana State University, USA
Supervisor: Assistant Professor Indika Kahanda

Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) is a novel framework introduced by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for describing mental illness. Since it is a fairly recent introduction, existing biomedical literature needs to be classified by RDoC for it to be effective. Considering that manual annotation of articles is highly resource-consuming, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques can be used to ease and automate this task. Therefore we employed those techniques to develop models for information retrieval and sentence extraction with RDoC.

Feb 2019 - July 2019

Education 

Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

Ph.D. in Computer Science
Aug 2022 - Now

University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka

B.Sc in Engineering (Honours)
Specialized in Computer Engineering
First Class (GPA: 3.90 / 4.00)

Nov 2015 - July 2020

St. Anne's College, Kurunegala, Sri Lanka

G.C.E. Advanced Level / G.C.E. Ordinary Level
Jan 2006 - Dec 2014

Publications 

  • Cooper, P.O., Yang, J., Wang, H.H., Broman, M.M., Jayasundara, S.M., Sahoo, S.S., Yan, B., Awdalkreem, G.D., Cresswell, G.M., Wang, L. and Goossens, E., "Inflammation impacts androgen receptor signaling in basal prostate stem cells through interleukin 1 receptor antagonist", Communications Biology, 7(1), p.1390, doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-07071-y.
  • Bandaranayake, P.C., Naranpanawa, N., Chandrasekara, C.B., Samarakoon, H., Lokuge, S., Jayasundara, S., Bandaranayake, A.U., Pushpakumara, D.K.N.G. and Wijesundara, D.S.A., "Chloroplast genome, nuclear ITS regions, mitogenome regions, and Skmer analysis resolved the genetic relationship among Cinnamomum species in Sri Lanka", Plos one, 18(9), e0291763, 2023, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0291763.
  • Sooriyabandara, M. G. C.*, A. U. Bandaranayake*, H. A. B. M. Hathurusinghe*, S. M. Jayasundara*, M. S. R. R. P. Marasinghe, G. A. T. Prasad, V. P. M. K. Abeywardana, M. A. Pinidiya, R. M. R. Nilanthi, and P. C. G. Bandaranayake, "A unique single nucleotide polymorphism in Agouti Signalling Protein (ASIP) gene changes coat colour of Sri Lankan leopard (Panthera pardus kotiya) to dark black", Plos one, 18(7), e0269967, 2023, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0269967.
  • Sooriyabandara, M. G. C.*, J. M. S. M. Jayasundara*, M. S. L. R. P. Marasinghe*, H. A. B. M. Hathurusinghe*, A. U. Bandaranayake, K. A. N. C. Jayawardane, R. M. R. Nilanthi, R. C. Rajapakse, and P. C. G. Bandaranayake, "Genetic features of Sri Lankan elephant, Elephas maximus maximus Linnaeus revealed by high throughput sequencing of mitogenome and ddRAD-seq", Plos one, 18(6), e0285572, 2023, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0285572.
  • S. Jayasundara*, A. Indika* and D. Herath, "Interpretable Student Performance Prediction Using Explainable Boosting Machine for Multi-Class Classification", 2022 2nd International Conference on Advanced Research in Computing (ICARC), 2022, pp. 391-396, doi: 10.1109/ICARC54489.2022.9753867.
  • S. Lokuge*, S. Jayasundara*, P. Ihalagedara*, I. Kahanda, and D. Herath, "miRNAFinder: A comprehensive web resource for plant pre-microRNA classification", Biosystems, vol. 215–216, no. February, p. 104662, 2022, doi: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2022.104662.
  • S. Jayasundara*, S. Lokuge*, P. Ihalagedara*, and D. Herath, "Machine learning for plant microRNA prediction: A systematic review", arXiv, Jun. 2021. http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15159
  • P. Ihalagedara*, S. Lokuge*, S. Jayasundara*, D. Herath and I. Kahanda, "miRNAFinder: A pre-microRNA classifier for plants and analysis of feature impact", 2020 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CIBCB), Viña del Mar, 2020, pp. 1-7, doi: 10.1109/CIBCB48159.2020.9277723.
  • S. Lokuge*, S. Jayasundara*, P. Ihalagedara* and D. Herath, "miRNAFinder: An accurate plant pre-microRNAclassifier with an analysis of feature impact", Engineering Students Conference at Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, 2020. https://aces.ce.pdn.ac.lk/publications/proceedings/escape-2020
  • D. Laden*, S. Jayasundara* and I. Kahanda, "RDoCer: Information Retrieval and Sentence Extraction for Mental Health using Research Domain Criteria", 2020 IEEE 14th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), San Diego, CA, USA, 2020, pp. 226-229, doi: 10.1109/ICSC.2020.00047.