Perumal Nithiarasu is Professor and Director of Research at College of Engineering, Swansea University. He is also a Deputy Head of College of Engineering and Dean Academic Leadership (Research Impact) at Swansea University.

Professor Nithiarasu has served on several University committees including HR Research Working Group as a chair and REF14 impact and appeal committees as a member. He has proposed and implemented a public lecture named after the father of the finite element method, Professor O.C. Zienkiewicz. The Biomedical Engineering research group led by Perumal currently consists of ten academic staff, more than twenty-five post-docs and research students.

A Mechanical Engineer by training, Perumal has extensive experience in teaching engineering students of different disciplines. His research areas of interest include computational fluid dynamics and biomedical engineering. He has been working in these areas for more than twenty five years and has published a large number of articles and books.

Well known internationally for his work, Perumal was awarded the Zienkiewicz silver medal of ICE London in 2002, ECCOMAS Young Investigator award in 2004 and the prestigious EPSRC Advanced Fellowship in 2006.

Perumal currently co-chairs two international conferences, including the well-known Computational and Mathematical Biomedical Engineering series he founded.

Perumal is the founding and editor in chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, published by Wiley-Blackwell, and was elected to the fellowship of the Learned Society of Wales in 2018.