Dr Madara Premawardhana holds a BSc (Hons) in Information Technology from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka and PhD in Computing from University of Buckingham.
Before joining Buckingham in October 2022 for her PhD, Madara worked as a Senior Software Engineer at SimCentric Technologies (Pvt) Ltd, a company specialising in military simulation technologies, where her work centred on research and development in simulation-based systems. This industry experience in the digital replication of real-world environments led directly to her doctoral research.
Madara’s research focused on developing ”A Game Engine-Driven Digital Twin Framework for Short-Term Solar Energy Forecasting”. Supervised by Professor Harin Sellahewa, she combined Digital Twins with Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Physics-base modelling, and simulation to investigate efficient solutions for sustainable energy production, including short-term solar energy forecasting. Her wider interests include the Internet of Things, Big Data, time-series prediction with LSTM networks, and real-time 3D simulations using Unreal Engine. Her technical expertise spans Python, C++, Unreal Engine and QGIS.
Alongside her research, Madara has taught as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the School of Computing and as a Visiting Lecturer at the Centre of Foundation Studies, and has taught Computer Science at secondary level. She has spoken at international conferences such as AI Summit London, PyData Milton Keynes.
Madara is an active advocate for public engagement with science and for women in STEM. She has spoken about her research at Soapbox Science Milton Keynes, given a talk on Digital Twins to the Adstock Science Club, and spoken at careers events for sixth-form students. In March 2025 she won the ‘Tomorrow’s Leader’ award at the MK STEM Awards.
Research Interests
Digital Twins; Net-Zero transition and sustainable energy; Machine Learning and Deep Learning; energy and weather forecasting; Internet of Things; simulation and Unreal Engin; Synthetic Data
Selected Publications
- M. Premawardhana & H. Sellahewa, “Using Digital Twins to Enhance Energy Grid Sustainability”, The Denning Law Journal 34.1 (2026), 65–78, doi: 10.5750/dlj.v34i1.2652
- M. Premawardhana & H. Sellahewa, “Digital Twins as a Framework for IoT Applications: A Review”, 7th SLAAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SLAAI-ICAI) (November 2023)
- M. Premawardhana, M. A. Azeem, S. S. Sengar & S. Dev, “On the Impact of Temperature for Precipitation Analysis”, International Conference on Frontiers of Intelligent Computing: Theory and Applications (FICTA), Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol. 370, Springer (2023), doi: 10.1007/978-981-99-6702-5_14
Awards
- Tomorrow’s Leader’, MK STEM Awards 2025
- 3rd Place at OpenWeather Challenge 2025