Neelika Malavige

University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Colombo, Sri Lanka

Neelika Malavige is a Professor and Head of the Department of Immunology and Molecular Medicine, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka and also an academic visitor at the University of Oxford since 2008 after completing her doctoral studies at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Society of Infectious Diseases since 2020 and a member of the technical advisory group to the WHO-COVID-19 technology access pool. She is Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in London the Royal College of Pathologists. She serves as an expert member on several government COVID-19 related technical advisory groups on public health response, control strategies, vaccine evaluation, regulation and vaccine deployment strategies.

She leads a large research group working on dengue, and COVID-19, focusing on immunopathogenesis of and vascular leak in dengue and translating these findings into clinical trials. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, her laboratory has been carrying out genomic sequencing, while also investigating immune responses to COVID-19 vaccines and the kinetics of T cell and antibody responses in patients with COVID-19. She has strong research collaborations with University of Oxford and her laboratory is a part of the A2CARES, which is one of the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases, NIH, USA.