Kamini Nirmala Mendis is a Sri Lankan professor emeritus at the University of Colombo and former malaria expert at the World Health Organization (WHO).
in Microbiology, to complete her medical training, Mendis returned to her alma mater in 1989, now split into the University of Colombo.
[2] In 1988, Mendis established the Malaria Research Unit within the Department of Parasitology of the University of Colombo, and she led them for 17 years.
[2][5] In 1993, the labs of Mendis and Dyann Wirth published the first successful use of the electroporation method to insert new DNA sequence into a malaria cell, in this case Plasmodium gallinaceum.
[6] Mendis is considered to have been an "architect" of Sri Lanka's successful elimination of malaria, and often writes about how the country needs to actively maintain this status.