Sri Lankan student awarded 'Asian Nobel Prize'

The Ramon Magsaysay Award which is described as the "Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize" has been awarded to a Sri Lankan student this year for his work with victims of the war and the tsunami in Sri Lanka.
Ananda Galappatti, a doctoral student in international health at Edinburgh received this honor for 'emergent leadership '.
Originally from Sri Lanka, the 34-year-old studies is following a joint PhD programme run by Queen Margaret University and Edinburgh University.
The Ramon Magsaysay Award, which is considered to be Asia's premier prize, recognises Mr Galappatti's spirited personal commitment to bring effective psychosocial services to war, trauma and natural disaster victims in Sri Lanka.
After studying psychology at Cambridge University, he returned to Sri Lanka in 1996 and set up the War Trauma Psychosocial Support Programme. Following the tsunami, Mr Galappatti founded a network of organisations and individuals to coordinate psychosocial services.

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