Professor Nik Bessis led his department's REF21 submission be the most improved UoA nationally. The overall score of 2.5* led the department reach a TOP50 rank in UK league tables (at that time), an improvement of about 40 places up. He was also instrumental to the successful application for a Athena Swan bronze award (2018).

He 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 (2015-) and was the founding Head of the Department of Computer Science (2015-2021) and the founding Head of the Department of Engineering (2018-2021) at Edge Hill University, UK .

Professor Bessis (2022-) is a Senior Advisor (Research) advising on Research Partnerships and on the implementation of the University 2023-30 Research Strategy. He leads a number of large-scale University-wide projects of strategic importance. He has initiated and developed (2024-) an international multi-institutional alliance for research on global challenges  encompassing several UK and non-UK institutions including businesses and the Business Connect (Innovate UK). He is the Institutional Lead (2024-) for UKRN and OR4 projects and a member (2024-) of the EUA-CDE Building Bridges Beyond Academia peer group with the responsibility to produce a framework for adoption from European Universities in relation to Doctoral Studies. He is a founding member (2024-) of the NW sustainability in computing group, a national initiative run by Business Connect. He is the founding Director of the interdisciplinary Data Science research centre (2018-) involving several departments across the University and was the Director of the Data and Complex Systems research centre (2017-2022). Income generated from both Centres exceeds £5m of external funding from UKRI, EPSRC, ESRC, Innovate UK, BA, Horizon etc. He is coaching and mentoring senior staff (Profs and Managers) at the University. He is based at the Graduate School.

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, Cyprus and Lithuania (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 and inter-clouds for a number of settings including disaster management. He was a visiting scientist at ETH Z (2017) and a visiting professor at University of Seville (2014). He is a funded proposals' reviewer and involved in a number of funded research and KTP projects worth over £15m. He led REF submissions in 2014 and 2020 and led his department acquire significant external funding. Professor Bessis is a leading publications’ author at the University. Nik has published over 370 works and won 4 best papers awards. His edited book on Big Data and Internet of Things (2014) attracted over 700 citations and over 150,000 downloads (top-25 on Amazon at the time). According to Google scholar, his h-index is 40. Professor Bessis has assessed over 25 Professorship conferments, examined over 40 PhD theses world-wide, organised over 40 conferences, serving as an editor of several books, special issues and the founding editor-in-chief of a refereed international journal, the International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST).

Prior to his affiliation with EHU, 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).