Dr. Vivimarie Vanderpoorten is Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT), currently on sabbatical leave from the Open University of Sri Lanka (OUSL), where she has served as Senior Lecturer in English since 2001 and previously as Head of the Department of Language Studies (2013–2016). Her academic career at OUSL began in 1994, giving her over three decades of experience in higher education.

She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Sociolinguistics from the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, where her doctoral research examined the implementation of bilingual education policy in Sri Lankan state schools. She also completed an M.A. in Applied Linguistics (TESOL), accredited by the University of Cambridge, at the same institution, and a B.A. (Hons) in English from the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka.

Her research interests center on sociolinguistics, language and gender, bilingual and English-medium education policy, and postcolonial English studies. She has published widely in journals including the University of Colombo Review, the OUSL Journal, and Society and Culture in South Asia, and has contributed chapters to several edited volumes on gender, education, and language teaching in Sri Lanka. She was a United States Fulbright Advanced Research Award recipient (2017/18) and has presented her research at conferences and universities across Sri Lanka, South Asia, Europe, and the United States, including the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Giessen, Germany.

Beyond OUSL and SLIIT, she has taught extensively as a visiting lecturer at the University of Colombo, the Post Graduate Institute of English, the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, and at American National College Patten University (California, USA), covering literature, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and creative writing. She has supervised numerous postgraduate theses including PhD thesis for University of Colombo's Faculty of Graduate Studies, and served as an external examiner for doctoral research.

Dr. Vanderpoorten is also a distinguished poet, having won the Gratiaen Prize (2007) — Sri Lanka's premier award for English literary writing — The SAARC poetry award in 2009 and the State Literary Award for English Poetry (2011), and the Godage National Literary Award for best English poetry collection (2018). She has published several poetry collections, including Nothing Prepares You, Stitch Your Eyelids Shut, and Borrowed Dust, with her work translated into Spanish, Swedish, Nepali, and Sinhala, and anthologized internationally, including in Out of Sri Lanka (Bloodaxe, UK). Her work has most recently been published by Routlege, Tangerine Press, UK and Yoda Press, Delhi.

She serves on the editorial and review boards of several academic journals and has contributed to national-level committees on English and Language education policy.