Athula B Attygalle

Attygalle had his primary and secondary education at Mahinda College in Galle, Sri Lanka. After his school education, he entered the University of Peradeniya and obtained a B.Sc in Chemistry in 1972. He then joined the University of Colombo and received a M.Sc in Bio chemistry in 1977. After obtaining a Post Graduate Diploma in Chemistry and Chemical engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, he obtained a PhD in Chemistry from Keele University in 1983.

Attygalle was a visiting professor at University of Houston, Texas and he has served as the Director of Mass Spectrometry facility at Cornell University. He has completed work there in GC-MS regarding insect substances and their identifications. Currently Attygalle is attached to the Stevens Institute of Technology as a Research Professor in the Department of Chemistry. As the head of Mass Spectrometry laboratory, he has been able to make Stevens a leading center for gas-phase ion fragmentation studies.

Attygalle was entitled for the award of "Inventor of the Year-2014" by New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame for his patented work in Mass Spetrometric Analysis utilizing Helium Plasma and charge exchange ionization techniques. This new ionization techniques(HePI) developed by Attygalle has been recognized as a very sensitive technique of detecting explosives and other volatile materials without the need for extensive sample preparation. Professor Attygalle has been an instructor with American Chemical Society since 2007. Attygalle's co-authored the 1999 article "Single-Site Catalysts for Ring-Opening Polymerization:  Synthesis of Heterotactic Poly(lactic acid) from rac-Lactide" in the Journal of the American Chemical Society has been widely cited.