Dr. M.I.M. Riyath is a data analytics and decision-intelligence leader, Finance and Business Analytics academic, and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Accountancy and Finance, South Eastern University of Sri Lanka. His work is positioned at the intersection of data analytics, financial decision-making, artificial intelligence, institutional intelligence, and emerging-market research.
With more than 15 years of experience across higher education, applied analytics, financial research, academic governance, and professional capacity development, Dr. Riyath focuses on transforming complex academic, financial, organisational, and research data into actionable insight. His professional work integrates analytics strategy, dashboard development, quantitative modelling, research automation, and evidence-based decision support.
A key area of his analytics leadership is the development of institutional data systems for higher education management. He has designed and deployed integrated real-time dashboards covering academic performance, research monitoring, human resources, capacity utilisation, and quality assurance. These initiatives have supported the transition from periodic manual reporting to continuous, data-informed planning and institutional performance monitoring. His work also includes student early-warning analytics and academic performance tracking systems designed to strengthen intervention, accountability, and student success.
Dr. Riyath has also contributed to practical analytics infrastructure through open-access digital tools. His publicly deployed R/Shiny applications support configurational analysis, computational text analytics, DOI metadata automation, statistical learning, financial simulation, regression analysis, time-series analysis, probability, and hypothesis testing. These tools enable students, researchers, and professionals to apply analytics to real-world finance, accounting, business, and research problems.
His research combines finance, accounting, artificial intelligence, business analytics, sustainability, and emerging-market decision-making. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed journal articles in internationally recognised outlets, including Emerald, Wiley, IEEE Access, and De Gruyter, alongside book chapters, textbooks, conference papers, and practitioner-oriented publications. His methodological expertise includes
SEM-ANN, DCC-FIGARCH, TVP-VAR, ARDL, PCA, fsQCA, bibliometric analysis, mixed methods, and machine-learning-supported modelling.
As an educator and academic leader, Dr. Riyath has designed and delivered courses in Business Analytics, AI and Data Analytics, Python for Finance, Data Visualisation, Business Statistics, Financial Analytics, and Research Methodology. He also contributes to the wider analytics, finance, and research community through editorial leadership, conference governance, professional training, and research capacity development.
Dr. Riyath holds a Ph.D. in Finance, an M.Sc. in Management specialising in Finance, and a First-Class BBA Honours degree in Finance. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Analytics, a Fellow Member of the Institute of Certified Management Accountants of Sri Lanka, and holds professional certifications in data analytics and business intelligence from IBM and Google.
