Dr. Chaitanya Baru (Chaitan) is Senior Advisor in NSF’s new Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) Directorate established by the US CHIPS and Science Act, which recently completed its first anniversary. He joined NSF in October 2022, after a 25-year career at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego. He previously served on two assignments to NSF–as Senior Advisor for Data Science in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate from 2014-2018, and as Senior Advisor to the NSF Convergence Accelerator from 2019-2021. In his roles at NSF, he co-chaired the NSF Harnessing the Data Revolution Big Idea (HDR) and played a leadership role in the NSF BIGDATA program, where he helped establish a unique partnership between NSF and the four major public cloud providers (AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, IBM). He helped initiate the NSF Data Science Corps program, was an advisor to the NSF Big Data Regional Innovations Hubs and TRIPODS programs, and supported a series of workshops on Translational Data Science. He was lead organizer of the  Federal Big Data Interagency Working Group’s Workshop on Open Knowledge Network. He helped in the ideation of several early Tracks in the NSF Convergence Accelerator, including Track A on Open Knowledge Network, Track D on Data Sharing for AI, and Track F on misinformation. He also served as co-chair of the NIST Public Working Group on Big Data.

In his 25-year career at SDSC, Baru led a number of research projects and collaborated with colleagues across a wide spectrum of science and engineering disciplines and also served in several leadership positions in the organization, and as a member of the senior management team. One of his research projects on big data benchmarking was sponsored by a group of industry partners (Brocade, Cisco, EMC, GraphSQL, Intel, Greenplum, Mellanox, Seagate) and helped establish industry’s first benchmark standard for big data (viz., TPCx-BB). Prior to joining SDSC, Baru worked at IBM on the DB2 Parallel Edition R&D and product team. Prior to that, he was a faculty member in the CSE Division of the EECS Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Baru has an ME and PhD in Electrical Engineering (University of Florida) and a BTech in Electronics Engineering (IIT, Madras).