Titles

• Senior Global Futures Scientist, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory
• Director, Global Security Initiative
• Professor of Practice, School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

Biography

Nadya T. Bliss is the Director of the Global Security Initiative (GSI) at Arizona State University. GSI is a pan-university, institute-level activity focused on addressing the hardest challenges in 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 Center for Cybersecurity and Digital Forensics (CDF), the Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming (CHART), the Department of Homeland Security Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency (CAOE), the Human Security Collaboratory, and the DARPA Working Group. GSI also serves as the University’s interface to the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and the Department of Homeland Security. Prior to taking on the GSI role, Dr. Bliss served as the Assistant Vice President, Research Strategy in the 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, she 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, 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. 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. In July 2017, She started a 3-year term on the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council where she is also a member of the Executive Committee. She has appeared on Arizona PBS, KJZZ (NPR), and in Christian Science Monitor, Phoenix Business Journal, and CIO Review.

Education

• PhD, Applied Mathematics for the Life and Social Sciences (Complex Adaptive Systems), Arizona State University, 2015
• BS, Computer Science, Cornell University
• ME, Computer Science, Cornell University