Emilda Thavaratnam was born in Sri Lanka in 1985 to Sri Lankan Tamil parents. During the civil war she sheltered in a bunker, and once stayed in a church for 30 days eating mostly beans, before fleeing Jaffna for Colombo and, in 1990 at age five, coming to Canada with her mother. Her father had already left for the U.S. and then Canada; her mother, once a math and science teacher, worked in a lampshade factory and retrained in early childhood education at Seneca College.
Thavaratnam has taught communications, including ESL, for more than a decade at Seneca, George Brown and Centennial colleges. In 2015 she began a PhD at OISE's Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education, supervised by Associate Professor Jamie Magnusson, working full time through two maternity leaves and the pandemic.
Her doctoral research is built on interviews with international students and frontline staff at Ontario colleges — students, she found, who sometimes arrived for 8:30 a.m. class after 12-hour overnight factory shifts. She is also writing a collection of diasporic short stories about Tamil migration, and hopes to expand her research and one day teach at OISE.
She received her PhD at Convocation Hall in June, with her husband Akil credited for helping her persevere. As she put it, "this moment belongs to them as much as it belongs to me."
Reported from New grad Emilda Thavaratnam’s journey from Sri Lanka to a PhD, by Sharmeen Somani (U of T Alumni News, July 2, 2026).
More from the original reporting: alumni.utoronto.ca/news/emilda-thavaratnams-journey-sri-lanka-phd