Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos

Academic and Research Contributions:

Dimitrios Nikolopoulos is the John W. Hancock Professor of Engineering at Virginia Tech. He is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and a Professor by courtesy in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In these roles, he is committed to advancing knowledge and fostering discovery in High-Performance Computing and Computer Systems. His research endeavors in these areas have significantly impacted both academia and industry, contributing to the evolution of industry standards and the enhancement of commercial software products.

Dr. Nikolopoulos’s scholarly contributions have been instrumental to the OpenMP parallel programming standard and have been adopted by RedHat Enterprise Linux, and a variety of commercial system software products, including parallelizing compilers, in-memory databases, and data stream processing systems. His work has also catalyzed advancements in experimental operating systems and programming languages for multiprocessor systems. Further information about his scholarly work can be found in his profiles on DBLP, Google Scholar, ORCID, Scopus, and his CV. A short bio is also available.

Accolades:

Dr. Nikolopoulos is an IEEE Fellow, a Royal Society Wolfson Fellow, and a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association, the British Computer Society, the Institute of Engineering and Technology and the International Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance. He is also a Distinguished Member of the ACM and a Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE Computer Society. His research has been honored with numerous awards, NSF CAREER, DOE Early Career, IBM Faculty Award, Cisco Faculty Award, Sony Faculty Innovation Award, SFI-DEL Investigator Award, and the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship, among others. His research has also garnered nine Best Paper awards from premier conferences (including SC, PPoPP, IPDPS, CCGRID, and DATE) and three Best Paper Award nominations (ICS, SC, and HPDC).

Mentorship and Funding:

Throughout his career, Dr. Nikolopoulos has mentored 24 Ph.D. students and 16 postdoctoral researchers, guiding them toward successful careers in academia and industry. His research initiatives have been supported by substantial external funding, amounting to $36.5 million of personal share of a total of $103.7 million in competitive grants from NSF, DOE, the European Commission, EPSRC, SFI, IBM, Cisco, and Sony.

Educational Leadership:

As an educator, Dr. Nikolopoulos is dedicated to shaping the next generation of computer scientists through his instruction in Computer Organization, Systems and Networking Capstone, Multiprocessor Programming and Warehouse-Scale Computing. Dr. Nikolopoulos has taught a variety of courses in Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, and Parallel Programming, and he has been recognized numerous times for teaching excellence by both his students and his peers.

Professional Service and Leadership

In service to the academic community, Dr. Nikolopoulos has held leadership positions with several prestigious computer systems conferences and journals. Since June 20024, he has chaired the Steering Committee ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS). He has chaired the Steering Committee of the IEEE International Conference on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software in 2022 and 2023. He has served as Program Chair of ICS in 2022 and 2023 and of IEEE CCGRID in 2014. He has served as Program Area Chair of SC in 2014, IPDPS in 2011, and ICPP in 2007 and as General Chair of IEEE ISPASS in 2018 and IEEE Cluster in 2010 and 2018. Dr. Nikolopoulos is also the recipient of two editorial excellence awards from the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems.

University Leadership and Advocacy for Diversity:

Dr. Nikolopoulos has held key academic leadership roles, such as the Head of the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Director of the ECIT Global Innovation Institute, and Director of Research at Queens University Belfast. Under his leadership, the School of EEECS at QUB was honored with two awards for enhancing diversity and inclusion, namely the (Athena Swan Silver, and Investors in People Silver). The School also achieved the highest ever research expenditures and graduate and undergraduate student enrollment, establishing itself as a major hub of computing workforce education and research excellence in the UK and Ireland. Dr. Nikolopoulos currently serves on the CRA Leadership Academy Committee.

Current Research and Opportunities:

Dr. Nikolopoulos currently directs the Performance Engineering for Emerging Architectures Laboratory (PEARL) at Virginia Tech and serves as the Associate Director of the Stack@CS Center for Computer Systems. His mission is to foster convergent research that co-designs computing system stacks with engineering artifacts that address profound scientific inquiries and pressing societal needs.