Ray Jayawardhana

Ray Jayawardhana
Born	Ray Jayawardhana Sri Lanka
Education	Yale University (BS) Harvard University (PhD)
Occupation(s)	Provost and professor of physics and astronomy
Employer	Johns Hopkins University
Known for	exoplanets, brown dwarfs, planet formation, popular science
Scientific career
Fields	Astronomy
Thesis	Circumstellar dust: From protostars to planetary systems (2000)
Website	drrayjay.net

Ray Jayawardhana is provost and professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to this, from 2018 to 2023, he was the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University.^[1]

Jayawardhana was born and raised in Sri Lanka, where he attended St. John's College^[2] and Royal College Colombo prior to pursuing higher education in the United States.

In 1994, he received his B.S. degree from Yale University. In 2000, he was awarded his Ph.D. from Harvard University.^[3]

As a graduate student at Harvard, he led one of the two teams that discovered a dusty disk around HR 4796, a young star, with a large inner hole, which was possibly carved out during the planet formation processes.^[4] At Harvard, his group played a role in establishing that young brown dwarfs undergo a T Tauri phase, similar to young Sun-like stars, with evidence for dusty disks and signatures of disk accretion and outflow. Disks have now also been found around sub-brown dwarfs or planemos. In September 2008, he and his collaborators reported the first direct image and spectroscopy of a likely extra-solar planet around a normal star.^[5]

He was a Miller Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and has served as dean of science and a professor of physics and astronomy at York University.^[6] for two years and an assistant professor at the University of Michigan for two years, before moving to Toronto, where he served as senior advisor on science engagement to the president of the University of Toronto and founded the Science Leadership Program to enhance the communications and leadership skills of academic scientists.^[7]

He was appointed a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto and an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan.

In early 2014, Jayawardhana was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Science at York University in Toronto.^[8] In June 2018, he was named the 22nd dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University.^[1]

In July 2023, Johns Hopkins University announced that Jayawardhana had been selected as its 16th provost.^[9] His primary research areas include the formation and early evolution of stars, brown dwarfs and planets.^[10] His current research focuses on characterizing exoplanets using telescopes on the ground and in space.

• Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics (2008)
• E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship (2009),^[11] awarded to enhance the career development of outstanding and highly promising university faculty who are earning a strong international reputation for original research,^[12] from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, presented by Prime Minister Stephen Harper at a ceremony in Ottawa on March 16, 2009.^[13]
• Canada's "Top 40 Under 40" (2009)^[14]
• Carl Sagan Medal (2020)^[15]
• The Main-belt asteroid 4668 Rayjay is named after him.

• Personal home page
• Profile at science.ca
• Profile in Wired magazine
• Big Ideas lecture on "Alien Planets" Archived November 23, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
• Kruger Cowne, agents, profile