Executive director, Global Security Initiative
Professor of practice, graduate faculty,
School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence
Senior global futures scientist,
Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory
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 the graduate faculty in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, and a Senior Global Futures Scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.
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 and a doctorate in applied mathematics for the life and social sciences (complex adaptive systems science) from Arizona State University.
Actively involved in national service, she is the chair of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Science and Technology Study Group and the vice-chair of the Computing Community Consortium. She also serves on multiple National Academies engagements, including: the Cyber Resilience Forum; Climate Security Roundtable; Ad-Hoc Committee Examining Defense-Related STEM Activities at Minority Institutions; and a Standing Committee on Transformative Science and Technology for the Department of Defense.