Rangana Warshamanage

Rangana was trained as a Chemist from the University of Peradeniya, then obtained an MPhil in Computational Chemistry from the University of Colombo in 2010 under the supervision of Prof Samantha Weerasinghe, where he developed a new molecular mechanics force field for Caffeine to study hydrophobic interactions at atomistic details. Then he went to study the structure of materials using X-ray diffraction at the University of Zurich. In 2014, Rangana obtained his Dr. sc. nat. in small molecule crystallography for his work on the structure determination and disorder modelling of industrial Pigment Red 170 using diffuse scattering under the supervision of Prof Anthony Linden and Prof Hans Beat Burgi, where he formulated a new groupoid symbol for the Pigment Red family.

In 2015, Rangana joined the Protein beamlines at the Swiss Light Source at Paul Scherrer Institute as a data processing postdoc to work with Dr Meitian Wang and Prof Kay Diederichs. He authored an in situ serial crystallography data processing pipeline and an offline data analytical toolkit for macromolecular crystallography at PX/SLS. Rangana then joined the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging division at the Lawrance Berkeley National Lab as a computational scientist to work with Dr Nick Sauter and Dr James Holton on computational methods to estimate per-pixel gain in the CSPAD detector.

In 2018, he joined the Computational Structural Biology group led by Dr Garib Murshudov at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology as a Career Development Fellow. Rangana develops the Electron Microscopy Data Analytical toolkit (EMDA) for EM data analysis. Currently, he’s a computational scientist in the CCP-EM group developing computational methods and tools for Electron Tomography.