Srinivas Aluru is executive director of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) and professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He co-leads the NSF South Big Data Regional Innovation Hub which nurtures big data partnerships between organizations in the 16 Southern States and Washington D.C., and the NSF Transdisciplinary Research Institute for Advancing Data Science. Aluru conducts research in high performance computing, large-scale data analysis, bioinformatics and systems biology, combinatorial scientific computing, and applied algorithms. An early pioneer in big data, Aluru led one of the eight inaugural mid-scale NSF-NIH Big Data projects awarded in the first round of federal big data investments in 2012. He has contributed to NITRD and OSTP led white house workshops, and NSF and DOE led efforts to create and nurture research in big data and exascale computing. He is a recipient of the NSF Career award, IBM faculty award, Swarnajayanti Fellowship from the Government of India, the John. V. Atanasoff Discovery Award from Iowa State University, and the Outstanding Senior Faculty Research Award, Dean's award for faculty excellence, and the Outstanding Research Program Development Award at Georgia Tech. He is a Fellow of AAAS, IEEE, and SIAM, and is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Golden Core and Meritorious Service awards.