Dr Mahendrini Ariyachandra is an Assistant Professor at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction (BSSC), University College London, specialising in Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Digital Twins. She holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Cambridge, where she was awarded the prestigious Cambridge Trust Scholarship. Her doctoral research focused on developing automated methods for generating digital twins of existing rail infrastructure.

Dr Ariyachandra leads and collaborates on research projects as both Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator, working with partners across the UK, Australia, the UAE, and Sri Lanka. Since September 2024, she has chaired the CSIC Early-Career Academics and Professionals Panel (ECAPP) at Cambridge and previously co-chaired the EC3 European Computing in Construction Summer School in 2022.

Before joining UCL, she served as Research Programme Manager for the Digital Roads of the Future initiative at Cambridge, where she led collaborations with over 24 industry partners and managed major research grants, including national digital twin initiatives with National Highways.

Her research covers Digital Twins, BIM, IoT, 3D reconstruction, information interoperability, AR/VR/MR, and Smart City applications, with a particular focus on roads, bridges, and buildings. A RisingWISE Fellow committed to supporting women in STEM, Dr Ariyachandra has received several distinctions, including Best Paper Awards at ISARC 2020 and SEEDS 2025, and was a finalist in the Young Researcher category at the Transport Research Arena (TRA) 2020. She has published widely on BIM-based project management and digital twin applications in smart cities, with her work dedicated to driving digital transformation and sustainable innovation in construction engineering.