Thangathurai Arunakirinathan (Kiri) is an Instructor in English at the university of Jaffna .He was born in 1966.He excelled in studies and in chess in the secondary school. He qualified for the Srilankan National Chess Championship event in 1983 when he was 16. The same year the worst ethnic riots in the Srilankan history happened. This marked the beginning of the decades long ethnic war which continues even now. This has its inevitable consequences and he had to give up competitive chess and had to change his line of education from Biological Sc to Arts in order to work and study .He mainly worked in the private sector until 1990 and then joined the govt sector as a teacher of English. While working, he also did his degree with Eng Lit, Philosophy, and Political Sc as main subjects and Social Psychology and communication St as ancillary subjects.

In 1993 he joined the Dept of Education-Jaffna as a special project coordinator and planning Asst and coordinated the work of non governmental organizations such as Reddbarna(Norway),SCF(UK),FORUT(Norway),GTZ(Germany)ACF(France)etc and UN agencies such as UNICEF,especially in the Psychosocial sector. He pioneered the school Mental Health programmes in the Jaffna district when he was with the Dept of Education. He did the certificate course in counseling (Part time course) in 1994 and worked with the Jaffna Teaching Hospital as a child counselor for 2 years on a part time basis. In 2000 he has completed masters qualifying examination(MPhil.Q) in Philosophy.

He has carried out several research programmes in child Trauma and presented papers at national and international level. He also followed short courses for trainers in child mental health promotion and conflict resolution and served as a teacher trainer for the dept of education for 6 years on a part time basis. He could not do his masters in Psychology, Psycholinguistics or in Eng in which disciplines he is working on because masters’ programmes in those disciplines are not available at the University of Jaffna even now.

He became a visiting instructor in chess for the Physical Education Unit-University of Jaffna in 1991 and continues to hold this post till to date. He joined the English Language Teaching Centre-University of Jaffna in 2001.He teaches English for specific purposes( Eng for Medicine, Eng for Agriculture, Eng for Sc and Eng for Social Sc)and general Eng .He translated more than 20 academic papers from English to Tamil and Tamil to Eng. He also worked as translator and interpreter for various organizations such as Bergoff foundation, Australian Red cross and Danish Red Cross societies. He is holding the posts of President of Jaffna chess Association, and Alliance francaise de Jaffna now. He is also a member of the Toast Masters Club-Jaffna.
He is now learning French and Spanish.