Professor Nik Bessis

Profile

Biography

Professor Nik Bessis received his BA from the T.E.I. of Athens, Greece and his MA and PhD degrees from De Montfort University, UK in 1995 and 2002 respectively. He is a full Professor of Computer Science and the founding Head of the Department of Computer Science at Edge Hill University, UK (2015-2021). Following his secondment at the Faculty as a Senior Advisor on Digital Strategy and TNE (2021-22) Professor Bessis is now (2022-) a Senior Advisor to PVC (Research) advising on Research Partnerships and on the implementation of the University 2023-27 Research Strategy. He is now based at the Graduate School. He is coaching and mentoring senior staff (Profs and Managers) at the University. He is also the founding Director of the interdisciplinary Data Science research centre (2018-) and the Director of the Data and Complex Systems research centre (2017-2022). He was with University of Derby, UK as a Professor of Computer Science and a Director of the Distributed and Intelligent Systems research centre (2010-2015). He started his academic career with University of Bedfordshire, UK as a Lecturer and progressed to a Principal Lecturer (2001-2010). He is a fellow of HEA, BCS and a senior member of IEEE. He has substantial external examiner experience in UK Universities and as a QAA subject/institutional expert in UK, Greece and Cyprus (2010-). In 2021/22, he was one of the advisory group members for the development of the QAA subject benchmark statement in computing (2022). His research is on smart systems and applications,  social graphs for network and big data analytics as well as on developing data push and resource provisioning services in IoT, FI and inter-clouds for a number of settings including disaster management. He is a funded proposals’ reviewer and involved in a number of funded research and commercial projects worth over £15m. He led REF submissions in 2014 and 2020 and led his department acquire over £3m of funding in 3 years time. Professor Bessis is the leading publishing author at the University, he has published over 350 works and won 4 best papers awards. His edited book on Big Data and Internet of Things (2014) attracted over 700 citations and 148,000 downloads (top-25 on Amazon at the time). According to Google scholar, his h-index is 36 and i-10 index is over a 100. AD Scientific Index 2023 positions him as a top 10 accross the University and a top 1 in Technology, Engineering and Computer Science. Professor Bessis has assessed over 25 Professorship conferments and examined over 40 PhD theses world-wide, organised over 40 conferences, serving as an editor of several books and the founding editor-in-chief of a refereed international journal, the International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST).