Neranga Fernando

Meet Professor Fernando

Years at Knox: 2025 to present

Neranga Fernando was born in Negombo in Sri Lanka and raised in Ekala, which is a small town on the west coast of Sri Lanka. He completed his elementary education at Newstead Girls College in Negombo and then went to Maris Stella College in Negombo to complete his middle school and high school education. Having earned his BSc (special) degree in Mathematics at the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka, he moved to the United States to complete his Master's degree and Doctoral degree in Mathematics at the University of South Florida. He completed his PhD in Spring 2013 under the supervision of Professor Xiang-dong Hou with a dissertation titled A study of permutation polynomials over finite fields. 

He moved to Boston in August 2013 to be an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Northeastern University. In July 2019, he moved to Pittsburgh to join Carnegie Mellon University for a year as a Eugene P. Shelly Visiting Assistant Professor. He took a break in the academic year 2020/2021. In July 2021, he joined the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at College of the Holy Cross where he spent four years as a Visiting Assistant Professor. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Knox College in Galesburg in Illinois from September 1, 2025. He loves teaching mathematics. His research interests lie in the areas of finite fields, coding theory, cryptography, knot theory, quandle theory, and ring theory.