2026 MAPLE LEAF AWARD

Dr. Ramanathan Sri Ranjan, P.Eng., is being nominated for his contributions to soil and water engineering, his long-standing service to the CSABE-SCGAB and ASABE, and his contributions to teaching, research, extension, and international activities. He has been a professor at the University of Manitoba since 1990. He joined the academic staff in the Department of Biosystems Engineering after earning his BSc (Honours) degree with a Specialization in Agricultural Engineering from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, in 1981, an MS and a PhD degree in Agricultural Engineering from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA, in 1986 and 1989, respectively. His training in Soil and Water Engineering helped establish a robust teaching, research, and extension program in irrigation and drainage, helping farmers see the economic benefits of better water management through controlled drainage. He developed and taught a course in Remediation Engineering, training students in soil and groundwater remediation techniques. He also worked with the environmental consulting industry, developing and testing innovative soil and ground remediation methods using bioremediation and phytoremediation. He has been training 37 graduate students (12 PhD, 25 MSc) and supervised over 70 BSc theses. He has published over 200 papers/posters in refereed journals and at national and international conferences. He has given invited lectures in Canada, the USA, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and China. He is a pioneer in the use of Technology in Teaching, giving numerous workshops to professors nationally and internationally. Dr. Sri Ranjan serves as a Teaching Mentor, helping new faculty at the university complete their training in the teaching certification program. He serves as the Associate Head (Graduate) in the department managing graduate student affairs.

He was elected a Fellow of the CSABE-SCGAB and awarded the Jim Beamish Award for his contributions to Soil and Water Engineering. He served as the Editor of the Canadian Biosystems Engineering Journal from 2006 to 2018. During that time, he modernized the paper submission to the Open Journal System. Since 2011, he has continued to volunteer his time transforming the accepted manuscripts into print-ready papers for publication. From 2011 to 2014, he was responsible for digitizing and using optical character recognition (OCR) to make the entire journal print collection from 1968 to 2000 freely searchable online.