Oshan Wedage receives Sri Lankan President’s Award for Scientific Research

Oshan Wedage, a PhD researcher at the Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has received one of the most prestigious scientific awards in his home country, Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan President’s Awards is an event organized by the National Research Council of Sri Lanka in order to evaluate the strongest scientific research that has been conceptualized and performed in the country. The level of contribution of Sri Lankan scientists to world leading pieces of research, as well as the scale of international collaboration, is assessed in each case. Oshan Wedage received the award in recognition of his work within the Department of Archaeology over the last three years, which includes his writing of, and contribution to, a number of highly significant publications for Pleistocene human origins and adaptations including:

Wedage, O., Amano, N., Langley, M.C., Douka, K., Blinkhorn, J., Crowther, A., Deraniyagala, S., Kourampas, N., Simpson, I., Perera, N., Picin, A., Boivin, N., Petraglia, M., Roberts, P. 2019. Specialized rainforest hunting by Homo sapiens 45,000 years ago. Nature Communications 10: 739 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-08623-1.

and

Roberts, P., N. Perera, O. Wedage, S. Deraniyagala, J. Perera, S. Eregama, A. Gledhill, M.D. Petraglia, and J.A. Lee-Thorp. 2017. Fruits of the forest: Human stable isotope ecology and rainforest adaptations in Late Pleistocene and Holocene (~ 36 to 3 ka) Sri Lanka. Journal of Human Evolution 106: 102-118.

Oshan Wedage accepted the award on behalf of a series of other Sri Lankan co-authors and collaborators that have been closely involved in this work, as well as co-authoring researchers Dr. Patrick Roberts, Dr. Noel Amano, Prof. Nicole Boivin, and Prof. Michael Petraglia at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. The journal ranking system used to determine the best of the published scientific work selected for review was source normalized based on weighted citations, avoiding bias towards any scientific discipline. As such, The Sri Lankan President’s Award highlights the significant role Oshan Wedage has played in the advancement of scientific archaeology in Sri Lanka and its international relevance.

Please join us in congratulating Oshan, this is a truly well-deserved award!