Malwattage Celestine Violet Savitri Gunatilleke (born July 30, 1945) is professor emeritus at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka's Central Province. She has had a long career in forest ecology and has been a leader in quantitative ecology and education. Most of her research has focused in the Sinharaja rain forest in Sri Lanka. She considers her main contribution to forest ecology to be spreading the idea that successful forest conservation depends on local conservationists. In line with this, she is proud of her students and their accomplishments in the field of conservation.
Early life
Malwattage Celestine Violet Savitri Gunatilleke was born July 30, 1945, in Bandarawela, Uva Province, Sri Lanka to M. Joseph Peeris and Ruth Peeris. She is the eldest of 6 girls. She received primary education at Little Flower Convent in Bandarawela, an agricultural city in the Badulla District from 1949 to 1953. From 1954 to 1964, she attended secondary school, corresponding to middle and high school, at St. Bridget's Convent in Colombo, the largest city and commercial capital of the island.
Education
In 1965, she began attending the University of Ceylon in Colombo, the only university in Sri Lanka at the time. In 1967 she transferred to the Peradeniya location. By 1969, Gunatilleke graduated First Class Honours with a Special Degree in Botany. She was the second person to qualify for this degree and the first woman. She also earned a subsidiary degree in chemistry. Shortly after graduation, in 1970, she began teaching as an assistant lecturer in the Department of Botany at the University of Ceylon in Peradeniya. Initially, Gunatilleke was planning on teaching plant pathology, the study of organisms and environmental conditions that cause disease in plants. However, upon receiving the position, the head of the Botany Department, Professor Abeywickrama, told her the department already had a plant pathologist and she would be teaching Forest Ecology, shifting the direction of her academic career.
In 1971, Gunatilleke was awarded a Commonwealth scholarship and moved to the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, United Kingdom for postgraduate education where she earned her master's degree in general ecology and a Ph.D. in Tropical Forest Ecology and Conservation. While in Peradeniya, she had been inspired by a presentation from Peter Ashton, a prominent tropical forest expert, on “Sri Lanka’s lowland forests” to study forests and land use issues. She was impressed not only with his knowledge of the tree family he was in Sri Lanka to study, but also his knowledge of the island's geography, roads, and waterways. She wrote to several plant ecologists in the US and UK, including Peter Ashton. Again, Abeywickrama would have an influential role in guiding her path; he suggested she be trained under Ashton because he wanted to strengthen the topic Ashton was offering in his botany department. Gunatilleke did choose to study with Ashton for her Ph.D. Her thesis, “Ecology of the Endemic Tree Species of Sri Lanka concerning their Conservation” is considered a landmark project in quantitative ecological research. The study revealed that a great proportion of endemic tree species were confined to Sri Lanka's lowland rain forests and highlighted the need to conserve them. This research required one year of fieldwork in 6 lowland primary forests in Sri Lanka: Kottawa, Kanneliya and Gilimale (wet zones), Daragoda and Barigoda (intermediate zones), and Ritigala (dry zone).
Although she pursued education outside of Sri Lanka, Gunatilleke planned on spending her career in her home country. Her father's encouragement to "return to the island to serve [her] motherland" played a role in her commitment of to not letting knowledge leave her country. She has stated one of her proudest accomplishments is avoiding the "brain drain".