Chaitanya Baru

Chaitan Baru is Senior Science Advisor in the Convergence Accelerator Office, Office of the Director, National Science Foundation. In this role, he provides technical leadership for the Open Knowledge Network (OKN) track of the NSF Convergence Accelerator. Baru has previously served as Senior Advisor for Data Science at NSF, in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE), from August 2014 to August 2018. He co-chaired the NSF Harnessing the Data Revolution Big Idea; played a leadership role in the NSF BIGDATA program; and advised the NSF Big Data Regional Innovations Hubs and TRIPODS programs. He was instrumental in creating the NSF Data Science Corps program and establishing the partnership between the NSF BIGDATA program and the public cloud providers--AWS, Google, Microsoft, and IBM. Baru is on assignment at NSF from the University of California San Diego, where he is Senior Advisor, Data Science Research Initiatives in the Office of Research Affairs, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Halicioglu Data Science Institute.

Baru has served in a number of leadership roles at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, since joining in 1996, including Co-Program Director, Data and Knowledge Systems; Division Director, Science R&D; and Associate Director of Data Initiatives. He established and directs the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Development lab and the Center for Large-scale Data Systems Research (CLDS). He has a broad set of research interests in the area of translational data science that includes topics in applied and applications-oriented research in data management and data analytics. His prior work has included research in parallel and high-performance database systems and semantic data integration.

Prior to joining SDSC, Baru worked at IBM in the DB2 database systems group; and prior to that was a faculty member in the EECS Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Baru has a B.Tech degree in Electronics Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and an M.E. and Ph.D in Electrical/Computer Engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville.