David A. Bader

2026 Sigma Xi Fellow

Statement

“My first memory of Sigma Xi is my father’s membership certificate, framed on the wall of our den when I was a boy in the 1970s. He was elected at Indiana University in 1958, and I grew up wondering what it meant. I found out in 1996, when the University of Maryland chapter elected me a full member as I finished my PhD. At the University of New Mexico, I was active in our chapter, organizing research talks and field trips for students, and in 2000 the chapter honored me as its Young Outstanding Engineer. At Georgia Tech, I mentored students and joined induction ceremonies, and at NJIT I continue that work through research seminars and student mentoring. Serving as a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer since 2023 has been a highlight. Visiting chapters like Quinnipiac and Kansas State, meeting students at their research poster sessions, and sharing how high-performance computing and data science tackle grand challenges reminded me what the Society is about: companions in zealous research. Being named a Fellow thirty years after joining completes a circle that began on that wall. This one is for my dad.”

Biography

David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor, Associate Dean of Research in the Ying Wu College of Computing, and founder of the Department of Data Science and inaugural Director of the Institute for Data Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Prior to this, he served as founding Professor and Chair of the School of Computational Science and Engineering, College of Computing, at Georgia Institute of Technology. Bader is an appointed member of the NIH National Heart, Blood, and Lung Institute Advisory Council, is an elected Board Member of the Computing Research Association (CRA), and previously served on the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors. Dr. Bader is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, AAAS, SIAM, and Sigma Xi; a recipient of the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award; the 2022 Innovation Hall of Fame inductee of the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering; a 2025 inductee of the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art’s Hall of Fame; and the 2025 recipient of the Heatherington Award for Technological Innovation. He advises the White House, most recently on the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) and Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem (FACE). Bader is a leading expert in solving global grand challenges in science, engineering, computing, and data science. His interests are at the intersection of high-performance computing and real-world applications, including cybersecurity, massive-scale analytics, and computational genomics, and he has co-authored over 400 scholarly papers and has best paper awards from ISC, IEEE HPEC, and IEEE/ACM SC. Dr. Bader has served as a lead scientist in several DARPA programs including High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) with IBM, Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) with NVIDIA, Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales (ADAMS), Power Efficiency Revolution For Embedded Computing Technologies (PERFECT), Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE), and Software-Defined Hardware (SDH). Recently, Bader received an NVIDIA AI Lab (NVAIL) award, and a Facebook Research AI Hardware/Software Co-Design award. Dr. Bader has previously served as the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing, and as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He serves on the leadership team of Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub as the inaugural chair of the Seed Fund Steering Committee. ROI-NJ recognized Bader as a technology influencer on its 2021 inaugural and 2022 lists. In 2012, Bader was the inaugural recipient of University of Maryland’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award. In 2014, Bader received the Outstanding Senior Faculty Research Award from Georgia Tech. Bader is a member of Tau Beta Pi (National Engineering Honor Society), Eta Kappa Nu (Electrical Engineering Honor Society), and Omicron Delta Kappa (National Leadership Honor Society). Bader has also served as Director of the Sony-Toshiba-IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Broadband Engine Processor and Director of an NVIDIA GPU Center of Excellence. In 1998, Bader built the first Linux supercomputer that led to a high-performance computing (HPC) revolution, and Hyperion Research estimates that the total economic value of Linux supercomputing pioneered by Bader has been over $100 trillion since its inception. The Computer History Museum recognizes Bader for developing the first Linux-based supercomputer which became the predominant architecture for all major supercomputers in the world. Bader is a cofounder of the Graph500 List for benchmarking “Big Data” computing platforms. He is recognized as a “RockStar” of High Performance Computing by InsideHPC and as HPCwire’s People to Watch in 2012 and 2014. In 2025, HPCwire named Bader as one of its “35 Legends”. In 2026, Scientific Computing World named Bader as one of its 25 “high-performance computing thought leaders in scientific computing”.