Prof. Nelishia Pillay Named Second Runner-Up at SAWiSA 2026
As South Africa commemorates the 70th anniversary of the historic 1956 march of 20 000 women to the Union Buildings, the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI) is proud to showcase the extraordinary finalists for the 2026 South African Women in Science Awards (SAWiSA).
Prof. Nelishia Pillay is a Second Runner-up in the Distinguished Woman Researchers: Natural and Engineering Sciences category, and a Full Professor of Computer Science. She holds the SARChI Chair in AI for Sustainable Development and the MultiChoice Joint Chair in Machine Learning in the Department of Computer Science at UP. Her research focuses on developing new AI approaches to solve problems associated with the UN SDGs, particularly SDG3 (Good Health and Wellbeing), SDG4 (Quality Education), and SDG9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure).
Prof. Pillay has been named on Stanford University's World's Top 2% of Scientists list from 2021 to the present, reflecting the impact of her research. This research has been made accessible to the community and the public through various means, including 28 tutorials at international conferences, four international invited talks, 12 national invited talks, a UP expert lecture, four radio interviews, and a television interview.
With an NRF B2 rating, Prof. Pillay is the author of 43 peer-reviewed journal publications (predominantly Q1 journals), 107 peer-reviewed international conference proceedings papers, 34 peer-reviewed national conference proceedings, two invited book chapters, two published books and one in press with Springer Nature. She has presented four keynote talks at international conferences and two at national conferences. Prof. Pillay has been awarded the UP Exceptional Academic Achievers Award and the Professional Academic Leaders (Best Project) Award. She has successfully mentored two postdoctoral fellows and supervised 11 PhD, 25 master's, and more than 100 honours students. She currently mentors three postdoctoral researchers and supervises five PhD and six master's students.
Prof. Pillay is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Computational Intelligence Society, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation. She has served as co-chair or track chair for various international conferences. She has been invited as an Associate Editor for six international journals, namely IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization, Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, Swarm and Evolutionary Computation, and the Journal of Scheduling. She is a reviewer for 20 international journals and a member of the programme committee for 15 international conferences.
