Chaitan Baru

Senior Advisor, TIP Directorate

National Science Foundation

Dr. Chaitanya Baru is Senior Advisor in NSF's new Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) Directorate. He joined NSF in October 2022 after a 25-year career at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), University of California, San Diego. He has previously served on assignment at NSF--first as Senior Advisor for Data Science in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate and then as Senior Advisor for the NSF Convergence Accelerator, Office of Integrative Activities. While Senior Advisor for Data Science, he co-chaired the NSF Harnessing the Data Revolution Big Idea (HDR) and played a leadership role in the NSF BIGDATA program. He helped initiate the NSF Data Science Corps program, was an advisor to the NSF Big Data Regional Innovations Hubs and TRIPODS programs.

While Senior Advisor in the Convergence Accelerator (CA), he was a member of the initial team that designed and launched the CA program. He was engaged in the ideation and creation of several of the early Tracks in the CA including Track A: Open Knowledge Network, Track D: Data Sharing for AI, and Track F on misinformation.

Prior to joining SDSC, he worked at IBM in the Database Technology R&D group and product team. Prior to that, he was a faculty member in the EECS Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Baru has an ME and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida and a BTech in Electronics Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.