2026 Excellence in Research Prize and Medal Recipient - David Bader
David Bader, a pioneering scientist whose work helped reshape modern supercomputing and continues to expand what researchers can learn from massive, interconnected data sets, is this year’s winner of NJIT’s Excellence in Research Award.
Bader is a distinguished professor, associate dean for research in Ying Wu College of Computing and the inaugural director of NJIT’s Institute for Data Science. He co-founded the university’s Department of Data Science and helped establish its bachelor’s and doctoral programs in the field.
His research lies at the intersection of high-performance computing, parallel algorithms and graph analytics. Graphs represent relationships among connected pieces of information: people in a social network, transactions in a financial system, proteins in a biological process or devices communicating across a computer network. As these systems grow to include billions or even trillions of connections, conventional computing methods can no longer analyze them efficiently.
Bader develops algorithms and software that divide these immense problems across many processors, allowing researchers to find communities, anomalies, influential connections and recurring patterns within complex networks. The same underlying methods can help detect cyberattacks, examine the spread of information, analyze genomic data, map neural connections and improve artificial intelligence systems.
His career has been shaped by the idea that powerful computing should be made available to more people. Bader pioneered Linux-based supercomputers using commercially available processors and networking technology. At a time when high-performance computing largely depended on costly, proprietary machines, the project demonstrated that researchers could assemble scalable production supercomputers from broadly available components and operate them with open- source software.
The approach helped accelerate an industrywide transition toward Linux clusters, which became the predominant architecture for the world’s leading supercomputers. Bader later received the IEEE Computer Society’s Sidney Fernbach Award for developing Linux-based massively parallel production computers and pioneering scalable parallel algorithms for real-world applications. That emphasis on access continues in his research at NJIT. Bader and his collaborators have developed tools that allow data scientists to work with supercomputers through familiar programming environments rather than requiring specialized knowledge of parallel systems. His open-source research includes software for interactive analysis of extremely large graphs, enabling users to explore data sets that would otherwise exceed the capabilities of an ordinary workstation.
Recent projects have focused on finding small but meaningful structures hidden within enormous networks. These patterns may reveal coordinated activity in a cybersecurity system, interactions among proteins or neurons, or relationships among large bodies of scientific literature. Other work examines streaming graphs, in which new transactions, communications and connections arrive continuously. By analyzing those changes as they happen, researchers can move from reconstructing events after the fact toward recognizing threats and other consequential patterns in real time.
A prominent voice in high-performance computing and data science, Bader is frequently sought by national and international media for expert analysis of artificial intelligence, supercomputing, quantum computing, and emerging technology. He has also advised federal agencies and national organizations on advanced computing, research infrastructure and scientific policy. Bader is a fellow of IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. His honors also include induction into the University of Maryland’s Innovation Hall of Fame and the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art’s Hall of Fame. He has authored or co-authored more than 400 scholarly papers spanning high-performance computing, graph analytics, computational biology and data science.
David A. Bader
Distinguished Professor, Associate Dean for Research, and Director of the Institute for Data Science
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Data Science and Associate Dean for Research in the Ying Wu College of Computing at New Jersey Institute of Technology.