Nadya T. Bliss is the Director of the Global Security Initiative (GSI) at Arizona State University. GSI serves as the university-wide hub addressing emerging security challenges, including borderless threats (cyber security, health security, and resource security). These challenges are often characterized by complex interdependencies and present conflicting objectives requiring multi-disciplinary research and cross-mission collaboration. GSI currently has approximately 150 faculty affiliates across 9 college-level units and is home to the Cybersecurity and Digital Forensics Center, the Human Security Collaboratory, Resilient Collective Systems Lab, and the DARPA Working Group. GSI also serves as the University’s interface to the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community as well as ASURE (ASU Research Enterprise – off campus, classified-capable research facility). Prior to taking on the GSI role, Dr. Bliss served as the Assistant Vice President, Research Strategy in the Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development. Dr. Bliss holds a Professor of Practice appointment (and is a member of Graduate Faculty) in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering; Senior Sustainability Scientist appointment in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability; and affiliate appointments in the School for Future of Innovation in Society, the Center on the Future of War (collaboration between ASU and New America), and the Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center. Dr. Bliss is also a Senior Fellow at New America. Before joining ASU in 2012, Dr. 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 DARPA, IARPA, ONR, NGA, USAF, ASD(R&E), and other U.S. Government sponsors.
In 2011, Dr. Bliss was awarded the inaugural MIT Lincoln Laboratory Early Career Technical Achievement award recognizing her work in parallel computing, computer architectures, and graph processing algorithms and her leadership in anomaly detection in graph-based data (presented annually to 2 employees under 35). She is the recipient of the R&D100 award (2011) for her work on PVTOL: Parallel Vector Tile Optimizing Library. She has also served on the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) ISAT (Information Science and Technology) advisory board where she co-chaired studies on Macro-Economics and Cyber Security and Science and Engineering of Functional Networks. Dr. Bliss received bachelor and master degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University, a PhD in Applied Mathematics for the Life and Social Sciences (Complex Adaptive Systems Science) from Arizona State University, and is a Senior Member of IEEE. Starting in July 2017, Dr. Bliss will serve a 3-year term on the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council.