Dakshina De Silva, Professor of Economics at the Lancaster University Management School, UK since 2012, worked at Texas Tech University from 2002
to 2011. He has held visiting or affiliated positions at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Université Paris-1, Maastricht University, Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, Wind Science and Engineering Research Center at Texas Tech University (TTU), and Economic Development Resource Center at TTU. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 2002.

Dakshina does research in varied fields such as Industrial Organization, Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, Bond Markets, Networks, Regional and Urban Economics, and Applied Microeconomics. He analyses how strategic interactions of firms and policy changes affect bidding behavior in auctions. In the field of networks, he examines how a board director's past environmental performance affects their appointment to a board and affects the firm's environmental performance. In the field of urban economics and regional science, he has focused on environmental economics, the effects of university knowledge spillovers on high-tech firm start-ups, geographic concentration and firm survival, agglomeration and firm growth, the effect of migration on regional wages, and spatial correlation on bidding behavior in procurement auctions.

He was the founder and now is co-organizer of the annual Auctions, Competition, Regulation, and Public Policy Conference in Lancaster, UK. He
was a co-organizer of the Network of Industrial Economists (UK) Winter Conference in Lancaster, UK in December 2013.

In interdisciplinary research with the Wind Science and Engineering Research Center at TTU (now the National Wind Institute), he has studied topics
related to labor, energy, natural hazards, and environmental economics. These projects have attracted federal and local funding. "Do Localities
Benefit from Extraction of Local Natural Resources?" a paper co-authored with Robert P. McComb and Anita R. Schiller, was awarded the IAEE's Energy
Economics Education Foundation's "Best Paper" award as the most outstanding paper published in The Energy Journal in 2020.