Professor Emeritus Kamini Mendis is a malariologist and a medical scientist and public health expert. She was a Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo where she led a research group which made several original scientific contributions to the field of malaria. She has trained and guided the next generation of scientists and built capacity in research and public health. Her work on the immunology of malaria including fundamental work on transmission blocking malaria vaccines and on the epidemiology of Plasmodium vivax have been seminal in the field. She has been the recipient of the the Presidential Award for Science in Sri Lanka, Vidhya Nidhi (1987); the Chalmers Medal of the Royal Society Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, UK (1991), and the Ashford Baily Medal of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, USA (1993). She was instrumental in the planning and launch of the World Health Organisation’s global flagship, the Roll Back Malaria Initiative in 1998 and served as a senior professional in the World Health Organization until retirement. She is currently an adviser on tropical medicine, and health research to the Ministries of Health of Sri Lanka and other countries in the Southeast Asian region and to the World Health Organisation and several international agencies in Europe and USA.