Narinder Kumar Mehra (born 4 November 1949) is an Indian immunologist, head of the department of transplant immunology and immunogenetics of the SRL Limited, Gurgaon.

Born on 4 November 1949 in Amritsar, in the Indian state of Punjab, Mehra did his schooling at Bishop Cotton School, Simla[1] and earned his graduate degree (BSc) with human anatomy, physiology and biochemistry as optional subjects from Government Medical College, Amritsar in 1969 before moving to Delhi to complete his master's degree (MSc) in human anatomy at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi (AIIMS).

[2] He continued at AIIMS for his doctoral studies and after securing a PhD in 1975[3] on the immunology of leprosy, did post-doctoral work on histocompatibility and immunogenetics at the laboratory of Jon van Rood in the Netherlands and later with John A. Hansen at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle.

[4] In 1979, he was elevated to lecturer with the additional responsibility of the clinical and research activities of the Histocompatibility Laboratory established under the Department of Anatomy in 1977, the year he joined AIIMS.

[2] Later, in India, he studied HLA-linked genes and identified that a subtype of HLA-DR2 carried a unique class II haplotype which made humans susceptible to diseases such as leprosy and tuberculosis.

[13] His group demonstrated that HLA genes with specific pockets in the peptide binding region controlled the severity of mycobacterial diseases, which was a first-time discovery.

[2] He also guided a team of scientists in a project based on polymorphic immunomodulatory genes for developing molecular medicine to combat infectious, autoimmune and rheumatological diseases.

[36] He presides over the Indian Society of Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics and was a member of the faculty of the 2016 edition of ISHICON held in December 2016 at Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh.

[45] He is a former member of the ELSI Committee of the Type 1 Diabetes Genetics consortium (T1DGC) of the National Institutes of Health and a former vice president of the Indian Society of Organ Transplantation (ISOT).

The invited speeches delivered by him include the first scientific meeting of Allergy and Immunology Society of Sri Lanka (ALSSL) and the Braunschweig Streptococcal colloquium.