Chamika Wanigatunga works as a business intelligence and performance analyst at the World Economic Forum in New York City. A 2019 graduate of Brown University’s Master of Public Affairs (MPA) program, he employs cutting-edge technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), along with the quantitative and qualitative research skills he honed during his studies, to promote the public good.
Wanigatunga grew up on Staten Island, the son of immigrant parents from Sri Lanka. He received his bachelor’s degree from Hunter College, where he double majored in political science and anthropology.
“I wanted to know why people do the things they do,” he said. “It’s a question I don’t think I’ll ever have the answer to, but the quest is something I find very interesting.”
After graduating, Wanigatunga joined the legions of the overeducated and underemployed, finding work wherever he could. For Wanigatunga, that ended up being at a self-storage facility in New York City where, for $15 an hour, he assisted people in stowing away portions of their lives.
“It was an interesting time,” he said. “Nobody who goes there is having a good day — people are going through divorces, or they’re moving; it’s just very stressful. But I like to think that everything leads to something, and that was an experience where I learned how to help people more effectively.”
Eventually, he landed a higher-paying job at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he spent the next few years developing new skills and saving money to continue his education.
During that time, he developed an interest in the convergence of technology and policy. He studied programming languages, particularly Python, and started thinking about how much faster his little administrative tasks could be if they were put into a Python algorithm.
“That really made me think about what's going to happen when computers take over just about everything we do,” he said. “Right now we’re living in a time where that’s happening. For some it’s exciting, and for others it’s a very distraught time because they wonder, ‘Where is my labor going to go?’”
But the 2010s felt different.
“It seems so far away now,” he said. “But there was an optimistic feeling that there was going to be some major transformational technological development. You had Twitter and Facebook at the time, connecting the world, and you had Google making all the information in the world accessible to everyone.”
His interest in the intersection of technology and policy, bolstered by the tech-positive ethos of the day, informed his decision to pursue a master’s in public affairs, which led him to Brown.
Brown University’s roster of distinguished professors and Watson’s culture — free of rigidity and open to self-starters — as well as the school’s East Coast location were all selling points.
But Watson’s one-year format sealed the deal.
“What really appealed to me was the timeframe — you can get a master’s in a year,” he said. “And in retrospect, graduating in 2019 was a lot more advantageous than graduating in 2020.”
Wanigatunga was one of the first students to take a class with Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs and Economics, Neil Thakral.
“What I got from his class was a critical thinking piece: you can’t just read something and say, ‘Okay, they’re right.’ Neil gave us research papers and challenged us to ask, ‘What’s wrong with this?’ Not to be subversive or oppositional, but to show that you can’t read an executive summary and come to a final conclusion; you need to look into the methodology, and you need to consider possible biases that the authors might have.”
In addition to furthering his quest to understand why humans do what they do, Wanigatunga sharpened his analytical reasoning, explored the intricacies of international policy, and developed the technical skills that later distinguished him as a job candidate.
He learned to navigate datasets and developed skills in GIS (geographic information systems), which layers data to help answer questions about location and patterns. His Policy in Action project with Project Citizenship introduced him to Salesforce, the world’s leading CRM platform, a hard skill that gave him a leg up in his job search.
“The technical skills combined with the academic freedom at Brown are what made the program really, really valuable,” said Wanigatunga.
After graduating in 2019, Wanigatunga began his tenure at the World Economic Forum (WEF), the premier institution for public-private cooperation known for its annual event, Davos, which brings together thousands of global leaders, CEOs and heads of state to discuss international challenges.
Wanigatunga began as a business services coordinator, handling administrative requests for WEF’s partnerships team. Drawing on his analytical and programming skills, he was able to discern task frequency, revealing which tasks could be automated to enhance performance and improve quality.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wanigatunga noted that “One of the emergency tasks I was assigned was to lead the implementation of the first digital event for the World Economic Forum,” said Wanigatunga. “It was called the Partners’ Advisory Group, and it was to advise a gathering of stakeholders on our plans for the future. The new technology I had to learn, which is a household name now, was Zoom.”
