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)

Nadya T. Bliss is the executive director of the Global Security Initiative (GSI) at Arizona State University (ASU). In this capacity, she leads a pan-university organization advancing research and other programming in support of national and global security.

Bliss is an experienced leader of science and technology organizations, with a track record of growing mission-focused research in the defense and higher education sectors and in-depth knowledge of the technology transition pipeline. She has more than 80 publications to her credit, holds two patents, and is a sought-after speaker around topics related to technology development and national security. She has appeared on PBS and NPR, and in the Christian Science Monitor, Axios, and CyberScoop.

GSI is home to the Center for Cybersecurity and Trusted Foundations, the Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence and Robot Teaming, the Center on Information and Narrative Complexity, and research efforts in geopolitical competition, bio convergence and space superiority. GSI’s team includes over 170 faculty affiliates and employees, with core research programs contributing approximately $30M to ASU’s annual external research expenditures.

Actively involved in national service, Bliss serves on multiple National Academies engagements, including: the Cyber Resilience Forum and a Standing Committee on Transformative Science and Technology for the Department of Defense.  In July 2024, she was appointed as a member of the National Academies’ Army Research Laboratory Technical Assessment Board (ARLTAB) and as chair of its Panel on Assessment of Network, Cyber, and Computational Sciences. She is a past chair of the Computing Community Consortium as well as past chair and current steering committee member of DARPA’s Information Science and Technology Study Group.

Prior to leading GSI, Bliss was assistant vice president, research strategy at ASU and spent a decade in various positions at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, most recently as the founding group leader of the Computing and Analytics Group. In that role, she oversaw all of the laboratory’s high- performance computing, along with a portfolio of programs focused on advanced analytics and computer architectures for defense and intelligence mission needs.

Bliss holds a professor of practice appointment (and is a member of Graduate Faculty) in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence and is a senior global futures scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Cornell University and earned her doctorate in Applied Mathematics for the Life and Social Sciences (Complex Adaptive Systems Science) from Arizona State University.