Meet Sri Lankan Researcher — Dr. Nadeera Nilupamali

3 min readNov 1, 2019

What are you currently working on?

I have a startup called ImmunifyMe. ImmunifyMe is a country agnostic, smart vaccine scheduling and monitoring tool. It monitors if the children are properly vaccinated or not. The technology ensures no child is left un-immunized.

What encouraged you to pursue this path?

Seeing the day to day challenges of healthcare practitioners. Actually starting ImmunifyMe is a very interesting story. I had a facebook page, I started to educate people on vaccines and one day I sent one of the posts to my Indian friend whose also co-Founder now in ImmunifyMe. I asked him to send it to his friends and tell them to get vaccines because India has a very low immunization rate. Then we started talking about it. He shared his experience on pulse polio campaigns in India and this led us to discuss Immunization and related problems. I’m from a science background and my friend had MBA from the National University of Singapore. None of us had technical competence so then we found our tech partner who had experience in cloud computing for more than 17 years. With our tech partner, we had all the elements needed to work on ImmunifyMe.

What is ImmunifyMe doing?

Well, how do we track the immunization now? The doctor marks in the book or paper right? We digitalize the whole process and monitor if the child is properly vaccinated or not. ImmunifyMe bridges the gap of lack of information and keeps track of children and caregivers at their fingertips and for that, they don’t have to spend extra money on that. The system would send reminders to caregivers to ensure the children should remain with that doctor or with the hospital. It is good for the recurring and sustainable business and immunization data management and so without investing a single penny. This data is available 24X7, 365 days, so the doctor could access the information whenever they want and plan their strategies and also for policymakers they have the real-time data to make decisions even if there’s an outbreak situation.

Where have you currently based?

I’m based in Sri Lanka but ImmunifyMe is in India, Luxembourg, and Chile. So I have to travel a lot.

Where do you find your best inspiration for your work?

I find my best inspiration in children. Helping them makes me happy.

What do you hope to achieve with your startup?

Three million children die every year due to vaccine-preventable diseases. One of the main reasons behind this is the lack of knowledge about when and why to come for vaccination. With ImmunifyMe we are trying to reach to as many children as we can and prevent deaths due to vaccine-preventable diseases.

Can you share with us some of your publications?

I have published several research articles. You can find it here.

What’s one of your biggest personal achievements so far?

So far my biggest achievement is building my startup ImmunifyMe. Before that, I had another startup called ‘Rock your paper’.

What lessons would you share with a budding researcher?

There is no failure in life. It’s just a lesson learned.

What motivates you to be a researcher?

Definitely, learning new things and finding answers to unsolved problems. I worked in India as a fellow for two years in an institute funded by the United Nations as a researcher before starting ImmunifyMe. At that time I worked on Dengue and Chikungunya viruses.