Executive director, Global Security Initiative
Professor of practice, graduate faculty,
School of Computing, Informatics, and Decisions Systems Engineering
Senior sustainability scientist,
Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability
Affiliate faculty,
School for the Future of Innovation in Society
Nadya T. Bliss, executive director of the Global Security Initiative (GSI)
As the executive director of the Global Security Initiative, Nadya T. Bliss oversees efforts to address the complex, interdependent security challenges of today and beyond. Prior to leading GSI, Bliss served as assistant vice president of research strategy in ASU’s Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development.
Bliss holds a professor of practice appointment and is a member of graduate faculty in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering and a senior sustainability scientist appointment in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. She is also a senior fellow at New America.
Before joining ASU in 2012, Bliss spent 10 years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, most recently as the founding group leader of the Computing and Analytics Group. Under her leadership, the Group’s research portfolio included a wide range of programs funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, Office of Naval Research, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, U.S. Air Force, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and other U.S. government sponsors.
In 2011, Bliss was awarded the inaugural MIT Lincoln Laboratory Early Career Technical Achievement award. Presented annually to employees younger than 35, the award recognized her work in parallel computing, computer architectures and graph processing algorithms as well as her leadership in anomaly detection in graph-based data. She received the R&D 100 award in 2011 for her work on PVTOL: Parallel Vector Tile Optimizing Library.
Bliss received bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Cornell University, a doctorate in applied mathematics for the life and social sciences (complex adaptive systems science) from Arizona State University and is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Bliss currently serves as an Executive Committee member of the Computing Community Consortium and as vice-chair of the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group.