Mr Lakshitha Kumaranayakalage
School of Science, Engineering & Environment
Current positions
Hourly Paid Academic
Biography
Lakshitha Kumaranayake is an Associate Lecturer at Salford Business School, University of Salford. He is a software engineer who teaches, researches and builds information systems. His work focuses on one question: how can organisations build and adopt digital and AI systems that are secure, reliable and useful in daily practice?
Lakshitha brings more than eight years of software engineering practice to his teaching and research. His early career focused on the design and delivery of enterprise information systems for the financial, public and commercial sectors, where he progressed from software engineer to project manager. From 2024 to 2026, alongside his academic role at Salford, he was a Software Engineer at ELAROS 24/7, a UK health technology company working with NHS and research partners. In this role he contributed to the development and cloud operation of digital health platforms within ISO 27001 and UK GDPR governance frameworks. He has also gained practical experience of IT infrastructure and information security in a managed services setting. This applied experience informs his teaching on information systems and digital transformation, and it grounds his research in how organisations design, secure and adopt technology in practice.
At Salford, he was a Research Associate on the AI-Cybersecurity Nexus project at the Centre for Sustainable Innovation. This UK Government-funded project helped small and medium-sized enterprises in Greater Manchester strengthen their cyber security and adopt AI safely. He also contributed to a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with industry.
He has taught computing and information systems in higher education for more than five years in Sri Lanka, Australia and the United Kingdom. He holds an MSc in Data Science with Machine Learning (Distinction) from the University of Salford, and he is an Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 8 Programmer.
He also develops his own software products and open source tools, including LetterBridge, a multilingual letter and communication service, and Page to Markdown, a privacy-first browser extension.
Lakshitha welcomes collaboration with research groups, industry partners, health organisations and public bodies, in particular on projects that need both academic rigour and practical software engineering. He is open to Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, industry-funded projects and interdisciplinary research proposals.
Areas of Research
Cyber security for small and medium-sized enterprises, responsible AI adoption and governance, information systems and digital transformation, clinical natural language processing, healthcare information systems, agentic AI security, large language model applications, business intelligence and data analytics, applied machine learning, cloud and software engineering, sim-to-real robotics.
Four current themes:
Cyber security and AI adoption in SMEs: how small and medium-sized businesses can adopt AI tools safely and improve their cyber resilience.
Clinical natural language processing: how language models can extract reliable and transparent information from healthcare communications and clinical text.
Agentic AI security: how autonomous AI agents can resist manipulation through the content they process, and fail safely when they do not.
Sim-to-real robotics: how robots can learn skills in simulation and transfer them to the physical world.
Areas of Supervision
Information systems design, data modelling and digital transformation
Software engineering, web development and cloud-based systems
Business intelligence and dashboard design (Power BI)
Applied machine learning and data analytics for business problems
Cyber security for small and medium-sized enterprises
AI adoption, governance and policy in organisations
Large language model applications and agentic AI systems, including security and evaluation
Clinical and health data applications of NLP and machine learning
Artificial intelligence in the workplace
Management information systems
Business information systems
Data modelling and databases
Data analysis and business intelligence (Power BI)
Digital transformation
Software engineering and web development
Lakshitha teaches undergraduate and postgraduate modules at Salford Business School and supervises dissertations and final-year projects across business, computing and engineering. His current modules include AI in the Workplace; Managing Information Systems and Transformation; Business Information Systems (Level 4: data flow modelling and introduction to databases); Business Intelligence and Dashboards; Business Innovation and Digital Transformation; and a Level 6 data analysis module on the Esports programme.
He has also contributed to Business Data Insights and Analytics, Business Intelligence in Practice and web development modules. He runs hands-on data analytics and Power BI workshops in which students build dashboards from real business data, and he brings live examples from his software engineering work into the classroom.
Before Salford, he lectured in undergraduate computing on a Flinders University (Australia) pathway programme. He was also Senior Lecturer and Programme Coordinator for BCS, Pearson HND and UCSC BIT computing programmes at ESOFT Metro Campus, Sri Lanka, where he taught cohorts of more than 500 students per semester and supervised more than 20 final-year projects.
Qualifications
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MSc Data Science with Machine Learning (Distinction)
2023 - 2024 -
BSc Software Engineering (SCQF Level 9), Scottish Qualifications Authority
2017 - 2021
Recognitions
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Research Associate, AI-Cybersecurity Nexus project (Gov.UK funded)