David A. Bader, distinguished professor and founding director of the Institute for Data Science in the Ying Wu College of Computing, has been named to the 2026 Class of Distinguished Contributors of the IEEE Computer Society.
The Distinguished Contributor Recognition Program is a permanent designation that honors members and affiliates who have made significant and sustained technical contributions to computing, to the Computer Society itself, and to the broader computing profession and community. The number of members recognized in a given year is capped at 0.5% of total IEEE Computer Society membership, and applicants must have at least 10 cumulative years of membership, including five consecutive years, along with a scored record of technical contributions across publications, standards, patents, keynotes and professional service.
Bader joins a class of 31 computing researchers and practitioners from around the world, announced this month by George J. Proeller, chair of the recognition program.
"I joined the Computer Society as a freshman in college, 38 years ago, and it has been my professional home ever since," Bader said. "What I value most about this recognition is that it counts the work that often goes uncounted: editing journals, building conferences and benchmarks, mentoring students, and doing the community infrastructure work that lets other people's research get done. That work matters, and it is good to see the Society say so."
Bader served as editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems from 2013 to 2017, and he is a co-founder of the Graph500 benchmark, which established a standard for measuring supercomputer performance on data-intensive graph problems rather than on floating-point arithmetic alone. In 2021 he received the IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award, one of the field's highest honors in high-performance computing, for his work on massive-scale analytics and irregular parallel algorithms.
His research group at NJIT continues to develop open-source infrastructure used across the field, including the STINGER streaming graph framework and the Arachne graph analytics library built on Arkouda. Earlier this year, a benchmark derived from Graph500 and contributed by Bader was selected through the SPEC CPU Search Program and included in the SPEC CPU 2026 suite.
At NJIT, Bader founded the Institute for Data Science in 2019 and established the Department of Data Science in Fall 2021, the first of its kind in the region. He also serves as associate dean for research in the Ying Wu College of Computing. Before joining NJIT, he was the founder of the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech, which he chaired from 2015 to 2019.
Across his career, Bader has secured more than $190 million in research funding, published more than 400 papers, and mentored 22 doctoral students. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, AAAS and SIAM.
The full 2026 class of Distinguished Contributors is announced by the IEEE Computer Society, which describes the program as complementing the IEEE member grades by recognizing accomplishments beyond the threshold of Senior Member.
