Harsha Ratnaweera is the President of the European Water Association (EWA) and serves on the Board of Directors of the International Water Association (IWA), where he is a Distinguished Fellow. He has been a Professor of Water and Wastewater Engineering at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) since 2012, and at Qingdao University of Technology in China since 2025. He also holds an adjunct professorship at the United Nations University – FLORES in Germany, and several honorary Professorships in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Prior to his tenure at NMBU, Dr. Ratnaweera was the Director of International Projects and Innovation at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), where he worked for 20 years. He earned a PhD in Civil Engineering (1992) from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and an MSc in Chemical Engineering (1987) from the National Technical University of Ukraine (KPI).
In 2024, Dr. Ratnaweera was elected a Fellow of both the European Academy of Sciences and the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences. He has also received numerous awards from national, provincial, and city governments in China. In recent years, his work has centered on digitalization and the green and circular economy within the water sector, focusing especially on the use of digital tools in process surveillance and control.
