David Bader (computer scientist)

David A. Bader (born May 4, 1969) is a Distinguished Professor, co-Founder of the start-up company Adapter, and Director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as the Chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Computational Science & Engineering, where he was also a founding professor, and the executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In 2007, he was named the first director of the Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at Georgia Tech.

Bader serves on the Computing Research Association's board of directors, the National Science Foundation's advisory committee on cyberinfrastructure, and has served on the IEEE Computer Society's board of governors. He is an expert in the design and analysis of parallel and multicore algorithms for real-world applications such as those in cybersecurity and computational biology. His main areas of research are at the intersection of high-performance computing and real-world applications, including cybersecurity, massive-scale analytics, and computational genomics. Bader built the first Linux supercomputer using commodity processors and a high-speed interconnection network.

Bader is an IEEE Fellow, an AAAS Fellow, SIAM Fellow, and an ACM Fellow. He has won awards from IBM, Microsoft Research, Nvidia, Facebook, Intel, Accenture, and Sony. He has served on numerous conference program committees related to parallel processing and has edited numerous journals. In 2018, Bader was recognized as one of the most impactful authors in the history of the IEEE International Conference on High-Performance Computing, Data, and Analytics (HiPC). In 2026 he received the New Jersey Institute of Technology's Excellence in Research Prize and Medal.