Prior to her current appointment, she was a Humboldt Research Fellow attached to the Department of Economics and Post-Colonial Studies Program at University of Munich and before that a Research Officer at the International Labor Office, Geneva, Switzerland. A native of Sri Lanka, she completed her Ph.D. (2001) at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, where she explored her research interests in gender, ethnicity, development and feminist methodology through her dissertation. She has articles published or forthcoming in Feminist Economics, Review of Radical Political Economics, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Gender, Place, and Culture and Asian Population Studies.