Professor Alfred Christy, Professor of Chemistry, Agdar University, Norway, visited Jaffna on March 19, 2018 after making an excellent talk and having discussion with Professors Rajapakshe and Kumara and their group at the department of Chemistry, university of Peradeniya.

On the same day, he had discussions with academics and research students at the Research laboratory, Department of Physics, and the Department of Chemistry.  The meetings were mainly aimed for the future collaboration on Water Splitting and he encouraged the academic staff write concept paper for initiating collaborative research on Water Splitting for Clean Energy Applications. Both Physics and Chemical societies requested him to make presentation/lectures on Operating principles of Spectroscopic analysis.On the next day, he spent much time at the Research laboratory, department of Physics met with the research students, and discussed about their ongoing project work as well as preparing for the presentation on March 22, 2018. On March 21, 2018 he spent his time at the Faculty of Engineering, Ariviyal Nagar, Kilinochi and delivered a talk on “Quantitative determination of calcium hydroxide in concrete by Near infrared spectroscopy” organized under HRNCET project in collaboration with the Institution of Engineering Sri Lanka Northern Province Center and Kilinochchi Chapter . The talk was well received and it was beyond the expectation as more than 80 participants (staff, engineers and students) attended it.

On March 22, 2018, Prof. A. Christy delivered a talk on “Operational Principles of Spectroscopic Techniques” which was jointly organised by Chemical and Physics Societies of Faculty of Science, University of Jaffna. Despite the Non-academic strike, about 40 people, including academic staff, final year students, research assistants attended the talk. In his talk, he covered the operating principles of UV/Vis and Infrared spectrometry. Further, he cherished his experiences as an academic staff at the University of Jaffna.

On the request made by Professor Christy, Dr. (Miss.) Shivatharsiny Rasalingam made a presentation on “Basics of Water Splitting” as he wanted to know the experiences and the ongoing work at the University of Jaffna in order to lead the future collaboration in the field of Water Splitting fr clean energy applicaions.   Dr. (Ms.) R. Shivatharsiny briefed her experiences, in particular, in the field of heterogeneous water splitting. A concept note with budget detail was sent to Professor Christy with a copy to Professor Dhayalan.

Overall, Prof. A. Christy’s visit to University of Jaffna was very productive, and we hope he is leaving Jaffna, after fulfilling the hopes what he brought with!

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