A Starfleet officer and veteran of the USS Victory away mission to Tarchannen III, who years afterwards stole a shuttlecraft and returned to the planet to complete her transformation.
Emilita Mendez is a Starfleet officer whose disappearance is investigated in the fourth-season episode Identity Crisis, set in 2367.
She had served on the USS Victory with Geordi La Forge and Susanna Leijten and was one of the five members of the away team that examined the deserted colony on Tarchannen III. Five years on, the members of that team begin to vanish one by one; Mendez takes a shuttlecraft without authority and heads for the planet.
The Enterprise finds the abandoned shuttles on the surface but no trace of their pilots. Dr Crusher eventually establishes that a parasite is rewriting the victims' DNA and turning them into the planet's native species. Leijten and La Forge are saved, but for Mendez the change is already complete.