Rohan Samarajiva is founding Chair of LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation think tank active across emerging Asia. He was CEO for eight years from its inception in 2004. His most recent co-authored book (2013) is Information lives of the poor: Fighting poverty with technology, published in Burmese, English, French and Spanish. He is a member of the UN Global Pulse Advisory Group on the Governance of Data and Artificial Intelligence. He served on its predecessor, the Data Privacy Advisory Group, since 2015. Samarajiva currently serves on the Specialty Board in Biomedical Informatics and as Examiner, MSc in Biomedical Informatics & MD in Health Informatics, Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo. He served as Chair of the ICT Agency, the apex body for information and communication technology within the government of Sri Lanka, in 2018-19. He was one of its founding directors in 2003-05.
He was Team Leader at the Sri Lanka Ministry for Economic Reform, Science and Technology (2002-04) responsible for infrastructure reforms, including participation in the design of the USD 83 million e Sri Lanka Initiative. Samarajiva was Director General of Telecommunications in Sri Lanka (1998-99), Honorary Professor at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka (2003-04), Visiting Professor of Economics of Infrastructures at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands (2000-03) and Associate Professor of Communication and Public Policy at the Ohio State University in the US (1987-2000).