Kalai Mathee is the first Florida International University (FIU) faculty member elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. Mathee is a professor and researcher at the FIU Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine (HWCOM). Of the two Malaysians ever inducted, she is the second and the first woman who was also educated in her vernacular language of Tamil.

She is one of 68 new fellows selected by the Academy this year. The Academy is the honorific leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology, one of the oldest and largest life science societies in the world. The fellows are voted-in through a highly selective peer-review process that focuses on their original contributions to advance science and microbiology. The following countries are represented in the class of 2020: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Chile, China, France, Germany, Israel, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The fellows came from many prestigious institutions — Harvard, University of California-Berkely, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of California-San Francisco, Johns Hopkins, Max Plank Institute, University of Cambridge, to name a few.