Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Guelph
Supervisor: Dr. Claudia Wagner-Riddle
About Nirmani Ranathunga
Nirmani earned her Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Technology and Management from the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. She then moved to Ghent, Belgium, where she obtained her Master of Science in Physical Land Resources (major – soil science) from the University of Ghent. She got a joint PhD degree in Bioscience Engineering from the University of Ghent and Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, in 2022. Through her PhD research, she worked with soil process-based models to examine soil-plant-climate interactions under climate change. This led her to a position working in Dr. Wagner-Riddle’s lab, where she is investigating soil processes and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to identify climate-smart soil management practices using biogeochemical models. With the use of process models, her research can contribute to scaling up large datasets on soil processes to GHG emission reduction for agroecosystems and sustainable crop production under changing climate conditions. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time outside gardening and traveling.