Mahendra Piraveenan is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney, associated with the School of Computer Science. He earned his Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Systems with first class honours from the University of Adelaide in 2004. After a short period working for an Adelaide-based software firm, he pursued his PhD at the University of Sydney's School of Information Technologies, focusing on topological analysis of complex networks, particularly assortativity, under the supervision of Professor Albert Zomaya and Mikhail Prokopenko. Piraveenan joined the University of Sydney staff in 2011 and has advanced to his current position as Associate Professor. He serves as Director of the Master of Complex Systems degree and is a member of the Complex Systems Research Group.

Piraveenan's research focuses on complex networks, networked game theory, computational epidemiology, infectious disease dynamics, biological networks, bioinformatics, systems biology, graph theory, multi-agent systems, and adaptive systems. His work has accumulated over 2,772 citations on Google Scholar. Key publications include "Percolation centrality: Quantifying graph-theoretic impact of nodes during percolation in networks" (2013, 258 citations), "Game theoretic modelling of infectious disease dynamics and intervention methods: a review" (2020, 225 citations), "Game theory in defence applications: A review" (2022, 151 citations), "Assortative mixing in directed biological networks" (2012, 129 citations), and "Local assortativity in scale-free networks" (2008, 124 citations). He has held research and teaching positions at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka, and maintains an affiliation with CSIRO. Piraveenan received the 2023 Supervisor of the Year Award in the Faculty of Engineering from SUPRA and was granted the University Postgraduate Scholarship for his PhD.

Professional Email: mahendrarajah.piraveenan@sydney.edu.au