Nelishia Pillay is a Professor and Head of Department of Computer Science at the University Of Pretoria. She is chair of the IEEE Task Force on HyperAHeuristics with the Technical Committee of Intelligent Systems and Vice Chair of the IEEE Intelligent System Applications
Technical Committee. She holds the Multichoice Joint Chair in Machine Learning. Her Research areas include hyper-heuristics, combinatorial optimization, genetic programming, genetic algorithms and other biologically-inspired methods applied to combinatorial optimization, automated design and sustainable development. This is one of the focus areas of the NICOG (Nature-Inspired Computing Optimization) research group which she has established.