David Bader (computer scientist)

David A. Bader (born May 4, 1969) is a Professor, Chair of the School of Computational Science and Engineering, and Executive Director of High-Performance Computing in the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In addition, Bader was selected as the director of the first Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is an IEEE Fellow, National Science Foundation CAREER Award recipient and an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Speaker. His main areas of research are in parallel algorithms, combinatorial optimization, and computational biology and genomics.
Bader is an expert in the design and analysis of parallel and multicore algorithms for real-world applications such as those in computational biology. He has won highly competitive awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF), IBM, Microsoft Research, Sony, and Sun Microsystems. He has co-chaired a series of meetings, the IEEE International Workshop on High-Performance Computational Biology (HiCOMB), written several book chapters, and co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing on High-Performance Computational Biology. He has co-authored over 130 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.

David Bader graduated from Liberty High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1987. He received a B.S. in Computer Engineering in 1990 and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1991 from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He then received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1996 from The University of Maryland, College Park. During his doctoral research, he was a NASA Graduate Fellow (1992–1996). His doctoral thesis was "On the Design and Analysis of Practical Parallel Algorithms for Combinatorial Problems with Applications to Image Processing." After receiving his doctorate, he was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Research Associateship in Experimental Computer Science (1996–1997).

From 1998 to 2005, he was a professor and Regents' Lecturer at The University of New Mexico. In 2005, Bader moved to Georgia Tech, where he is now a Full Professor. He has served on numerous conference program committees related to parallel processing, edited numerous journals, published numerous articles, and is a Fellow of the IEEE Computer Society, and a Member of the ACM.

Bader serves on the Steering Committees of the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) and HiPC conferences, and was the General co-Chair for IPDPS in 2004—2005, and Vice General Chair for HiPC in 2002—2004. David has previously chaired several conference program committees, was the Program Chair for HiPC 2005, and a Program Vice-Chair for IPDPS 2006. Bader is the General Chair of the 24th IPDPS, to be held on April 19–23, 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia. Bader has been an associate editor of several journals, including IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE DSOnline, Parallel Computing, and the ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics, and has published over 100 articles in peer reviewed journals and conferences. From July 2003 to June 2007, Bader was also the chair of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Parallel Processing.

In November 2006, Bader was selected by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, to direct the first Center of Competence for the Cell Processor. Bader also serves on the Internet2 Research Advisory Council. Bader was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2009. Since 2011, he has been working with the Georgia Tech Research Institute on the Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning project. Dr. Bader also plays leadership roles in: Computing Research Association (CRA) Board, NSF Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, Council on Competitiveness High Performance Computing Advisory Committee, IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors and Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

He is an NSF CAREER Award recipient, an investigator on several NSF awards, a distinguished speaker in the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitors Program, and is a member of the IBM PERCS team for the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems program.

In 2011, he was named a Fellow Member of the AAAS. He was also named a "Rock Star of High Performance Computing" by InsideHPC in 2011, and a member of "People to Watch" by HPC Wire in 2012 and 2014. He is an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America and a Vigil Honoree in the Order of the Arrow.