Dileni Gunewardena

Dileni N. B. Gunewardena is Professor of Economics at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, with more than thirty years of experience in development-oriented research, higher education, and policy engagement. Her research spans poverty and inequality measurement, gender and labour economics, human development, education, and, more recently, the care economy. She has held visiting and fellowship positions at the American University (Program in Gender Analysis in Economics), the Brookings Institution as an Echidna Global Scholar, the University of California–Riverside as a Fulbright Research Scholar, and the University of Warwick as a visiting scholar.

Professor Gunewardena has led and secured major competitive research grants from Co-Impact, the Social Science Research Council of Canada, Open Society Foundations, the MacArthur Foundation, the New Venture Fund/Echidna Foundation, and the Poverty and Economic Policy (PEP) Research Network. She currently leads nationally significant research on valuing unpaid care work and gender-transformative care economy policies in Sri Lanka.

She has made sustained contributions to curriculum design and capacity building, including leading the development of postgraduate Gender Economics curricula at the University of Peradeniya with Open Society Foundation support, and coordinating the launch of a Global Master’s in Development Practice programme funded by the MacArthur Foundation. She has also led international training initiatives, notably the design of a multi-module Gender Equality and Inclusion online course for the PEP Research Network, and has delivered training and policy workshops for UN Women, the World Bank, and the International Labour Organization.

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