Dr Risintha Premaratne is technical officer for Malaria at the Regional Office for South East Asia (SEARO) at the World Health Organization (WHO). He was the former director of the National Malaria Control Programme, Anti Malaria Campaign at the Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka and played a leading role in the last stage of malaria elimination and the achievement of the WHO malaria-free certification for the country in September 2016. Prior to joining the WHO, Dr Premaratne served as director of Research at the Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka.

He has held different positions and served at different levels locally and internationally, including service at the WHO in Switzerland; serving as a WHO consultant for immunization in India and Bangladesh; WHO Stata trainer in the Maldives; WHO trainer on malaria elimination in the Greater Mekong Sub region and Zanzibar; and several other country-posts in the African and Asia-Pacific regions. He has been involved in emergency response operations, including rescue and relief operations in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, where he served as an epidemiologist in the field and later as a member of the Presidential Task Force for Rescue and Relief. He also worked on post-conflict disease prevention and control operations at camps for internally displaced people in the north of Sri Lanka in 2009; rapid response for the dengue epidemic in Punjab, Pakistan in 2011; and more recently, rapid response for the largest-ever dengue epidemic in Sri Lanka in 2017 and Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Bangladesh in 2018.

Dr Premaratne earned bachelor’s degrees in Medicine and Surgery, master’s and Medical degrees in Community Medicine from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. He is a board-certified specialist in Community Medicine and earned a second master’s degree in Public Health in Biosecurity at the Massey University in New Zealand. He has experience in surveillance, immunization, field epidemiology, research methods, statistics, monitoring and evaluation, and program management and has special interest in malaria elimination.