2025 Distinguished Alumni Awards Emcee

David Bader

David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor 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. Dr. Bader is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, AAAS, and SIAM; a recipient of the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award; and the 2022 Innovation Hall of Fame inductee of the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering.

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. In 2012, Bader was the inaugural recipient of University of Maryland’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award.

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.