Bhagya Senaratne is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Global Asia at the Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai. She is also a Senior Lecturer (U.S. Associate Professor) in the Department of Strategic Studies, at General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, Sri Lanka (KDU). Her research at the Center for Global Asia focuses on the BRI in South Asia, focusing on vernacular literature. She researches and teaches on areas related to Foreign Policy Analysis (Sri Lanka, China, U.S.), Diplomacy, Strategic Communications and Maritime Security.

Senaratne has served in several editorial boards such as the Journal of Defence & Policy Analysis and the Defence and Security Journal published of which she was the Editor-in-Chief in 2021. She co-edited Pakistan-Sri Lanka Relations: A Story of Friendship in 2017 with Muhammad Imran and Sri Lanka’s Post-Independence Defence Policy: Past, Present and Future Projections in 2023 with Sanath de Silva. She has a podcast with the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), USA and writes to the Stimson Center’s South Asian Voices on Sri Lanka’s foreign policy.

Among the awards and honours received, Senaratne was the recipient of the U.S. State Department’s Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund (AEIF) Award in 2020, the U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) in 2019, and the 22^nd Ship for World Youth Programme awarded jointly by the Cabinet Office of Japan and the United Nations University in Tokyo, Japan in 2010 to name a few. She is an alumna of the University of Colombo, the Indian Institute for Mass Communication (IIMC), the Geneva Center for Security Policy, the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS), the Near East and South Asia Center (NESA), the IVLP and SWY. Senaratne was a Visiting Scholar at the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS) in Beijing, China in 2017. She received her Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.