Arokiasamy Perianayagam is a  Professor at NCAER leading research programmes in the area of health and health economics.

He has been a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Policy Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, and before that, he was Professor and Head of the Department of Studies at the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai where he served as faculty for over three decades. His subject areas of teaching and research expertise cover demography, public health and health economics, ageing, and global health, development studies and large-scale health survey research. He has supervised 23 PhD research students, published over 100 research papers in top-rated international peer-reviewed journals in the subject areas of demography, public health, epidemiology, and social sciences. As the lead Principal Investigator, he directed several nationwide surveys and pioneering research studies.

He has served as a member of different ministries (MoHFW, MoSJE, ICMR, NITI Aayog), INSA, US-NAS, SNSF, UK-NSO and many national and international collaborative consortium. He was also advisor/international consultant in institutions such as WHO, UNFPA, HSPH, University of Southern California etc. He was educated at the University of Madras, Annamalai University and received postdoctoral research training at the London School of Economics (LSE).