Prof. Dr. Nishantha Sampath Punchihewa is Professor of Commercial Law and the current Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Colombo (Sri Lanka). He has been a Senior Fellow in the sub-project “Digital Access to Library Content – Legal Frameworks in Germany and Sri Lanka” at the Centre for Advanced Study since 2024.

Punchihewa studied law in Colombo (LL.B. 2000), Augsburg and Munich (LL.M. 2009), where he received his doctorate in 2015 with a thesis on intellectual property law in Sri Lanka. He was called to the Bar in 2001 and, in the same year, took on teaching responsibilities at the University of Colombo. He has repeatedly taken on additional teaching assignments at various universities in Sri Lanka, many of which continued after he was appointed Professor of Commercial Law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Colombo in 2022.

His research interests include intellectual property rights and innovation, competition and antitrust law, consumer protection, protection of biotechnological inventions, information technology law and the interface between human rights and intellectual property law.

A list of his publications is available at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0-TutcIAAAAJ&hl=en.