By Ben Kennedy
For Prem Attanayake, a lifetime of engineering experience is not just a benefit for LLNL: it’s helping communities around the world, as well. At the Lab, he provides the Environmental Restoration Department (ERD) with support for special projects, mentorship for professionals and review of documents for technical quality. As a volunteer for Engineers without Borders, he consults on critically important infrastructure projects taking place thousands of miles away.
“It makes me feel good to give something back,” he says. “That’s the main reason. I have done things in the past to help various causes — this is a continuation of that.”
In 2021, Attanayake has been helping a small community in central Ecuador replace their shallow, contaminated wells for drinking water with deeper wells that feed water to a treatment facility and then onward to the people. While the pandemic has prevented travel, he hopes to make the trip sometime soon.
Additionally, Attanayake has remained involved with his native Sri Lanka. In the early 1990s, he gave free seminars for several months to share his groundwater engineering knowledge, and he started an initiative to collect and ship used science and engineering textbooks to university libraries there. To date, he has sent more than 500 books to Sri Lanka.
But his giving spirit is not limited only to engineering. “Even here,” he says, “my son and I used to volunteer at the animal shelter, just to support the local organization. It’s just wanting to help something, some cause.”
