Chikondi is a PhD student jointly registered with University of Liverpool, UK and the College of Medicine (COM), University of Malawi and she is based at the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme (MLW). She holds a BSc. in Medical Laboratory Technology obtained in 2012 with credit. She then worked as a laboratory technologist and research intern with research projects at COM and MLW, respectively. During that time, she was awarded a scholarship to do Master of Philosophy (MPhil) in Public Health which she graduated in 2018. Her MPhil research work was on assessing the challenges in implementation of early infant HIV diagnosis in HIV-exposed infants in rural Malawi.
Her current research interest, which transformed into her PhD research work, is to understand the immunological factors that could explain why rotavirus vaccine underperforms in low-income countries. She believes that better knowledge of the rotavirus vaccine-induced immunity would inform the design of more effective next generation rotavirus vaccine candidates. She aims to become one of the few female independent African Biomedical Research Scientist.