Prof Katherine Malan

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Katherine Malan
Full professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at UNISA

Katherine Malan is a full professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at UNISA. Her research interests include

  • automated algorithm/model selection in optimisation and machine learning,
  • fitness landscape analysis, particularly the analysis of optimisation problems in relation to population-based (mostly nature-inspired) algorithm performance, and
  • the application of computational intelligence techniques to real-world optimisation and data mining problems.

She has published over 50 journal articles, book chapters and conference papers and has an h-index of 25 with over 2000 citations to her work on Google Scholar. In 2025 she was awarded an NRF B3-rating confirming that she enjoys considerable international recognition by her peers for the high quality and impact of her research. Since 2023 she has been listed in the top 2% of scientists worldwide by the Stanford University/Elsevier rankings in the field of Artificial Intelligence & Image Processing.

She has 30 years' lecturing experience, mostly in Computer Science, at three different South African universities and has co-authored two programming textbooks. She is editor-in-chief of South African Computer Journal, associate editor for Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, and serves as a reviewer for over 20 Web of Science journals and many local and international conferences. She currently holds the position of chair of the Evolutionary Computation Technical Committee of the IEEE society and is a council member for the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists.