Lakmini Premadasa, PhD

Dr Lakmini Premadasa became interested in virology research, specifically HIV during her undergraduate at University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. As a result, she decided to obtain her PhD focusing on HIV research. Dr Premadasa received her PhD in Nanoscience at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her research focused on co-translational genetic switching mechanisms of HIV-genome during protein synthesis. She has extensively studied the anti-sense tethering interactions between human thioredoxin Reductase 1 mRNA and HIV genome and the effect of selenium on RNA viruses. After finishing her PhD, she worked as a biosafety level 3 lab manager at University of North Carolina Greensboro and later joined North Carolina State University, College of Veterinary Medicine as a research associate. During this period, she gained expertise in animal model studies (swine) relating to immunological modulations of porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome virus (PRRSV) and swine influenza virus.

After joining Dr Mohan’s lab at Texas Biomedical Research Institute in 2020 as a postdoctoral scientist, she has gained extensive theoretical and practical knowledge on the roles of cannabinoids in SIV/HIV infection in Rhesus macaques. As her first project in the lab, she studied the modulation of long non-coding RNA landscape in THC treated SIV infected Rhesus macaques. Currently, she has expanded her research interests in to the areas of cannabinoids’ modulation of gut-microbiota-brain axis in HIV/SIV infection and HIV/SIV induced cardiometabolic diseases and other co-morbidities.