Ashani Hangawatte

Research Assistant

Ashani is currently a PhD student at the Ohio State Unversity. She was born in Kandy, Sri Lanka, grew up spending most of her time in nature instead of books, and her passion for nature and wildlife has lead her to pursue her studies in Biology. In 2019 she graduated with a Bachelors (hons) in Zoology from The Open University of Sri Lanka. Her undergraduate research focused on the ecological and genetic diversity of freshwater fish in the Kala Oya River basin, Sri Lanka.

Ashani works as a volunteer veterinary assistant at the National Zoological Gardens, Dehiwala, Sri Lanka and has treated and hand-reared many wild and captive bred species of wildlife. She has also worked on a number of projects related to marine mammals, captive sloth bears, and volunteers her time for various awareness programs and workshops conducted by Small Cat Advocacy and Research.

Her current interests lie in the fields of urban wildlife and ecology, marine biology, spatial ecology and population dynamics in the context of urbanisation, genetic diversity and pathological diseases of wild cats.

In charge of: