Nelishia Pillay is an Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She holds a Phd in Computer Science from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her research areas include hyper-heuristics, combinatorial optimization, genetic programming, genetic algorithms and other biologically-inspired methods. 

She has published in these areas in journals, national and international conference proceedings. She has also established the NICOG (Nature Inspired Computing Optimization Group) and is a member of the IEEE Task Force on Hyper-Heuristics with the Technical Committee of Intelligent Systems and Applications at IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. She has served on program committees for numerous national and international conferences and is a reviewer for various journals.