Dr Shashika D. Rathnayaka is an applied economist specialising in food systems, consumer demand modelling, and the economic evaluation of public health nutrition policies.

Her research interests include: food demand analysis, fiscal and regulatory food policy, dietary transitions, and the economic evaluation of interventions aimed at improving population diets and food system sustainability.

Her research develops and applies advanced econometric demand systems and microsimulation frameworks to evaluate taxation, subsidy, and regulatory interventions within complex food environments. Her current work at Imperial contributes to research on fiscal and regulatory policies targeting ultra-processed foods and their implications for population health and health inequalities.

She holds a PhD in Economics from Griffith University, Australia. Prior to joining Imperial College London, she held academic and research positions at the University of Greenwich and the University of Aberdeen, where she contributed to government-funded research on food system sustainability, dietary policy, and price interventions.

Her work integrates large-scale household consumption datasets with nutritional and environmental indicators to analyse the health, distributional, and environmental impacts of food policy interventions. As part of this work, she contributed to the development of Scotland’s first sub-national food balance sheets and a food self-sufficiency index—analytical tools that now support policy discussions under the Good Food Nation Plan.

Dr Rathnayaka is the author of Economic Development and Consumption Patterns in Asian Countries (Springer, 2024). Her research has been published in journals including Agricultural Economics, Economic Modelling, Applied Economics, Economic Analysis and Policy, Empirical Economics, Agriculture and Food Security,  Public Health Nutrition, Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics.

She is also affiliated with the University of Aberdeen as an Honorary Research Fellow and is a Fellow of the Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutes (SEFARI).