About Dimitrios

Academic and Research Contributions:

Dimitrios Nikolopoulos is the John W. Hancock Professor of Engineering at Virginia Tech. He serves as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science while also holding a courtesy appointment in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In these roles, he is dedicated to advancing knowledge and promoting discovery in High-Performance Computing and Computer Systems. His research efforts in these fields have had a significant impact on both academia and industry, aiding in the development of industry standards and the improvement of commercial software products.

Dimitrios’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, along with a Wikipedia entry about his work.

Accolades:

Dimitrios 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 received numerous awards, including the 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. Additionally, his work has earned nine Best Paper awards from top conferences (including SC, PPoPP, IPDPS, CCGRID, and DATE) and three Best Paper Award nominations (ICS, SC, and HPDC).

Mentorship and Funding:

Throughout his career, Dimitrios has mentored 24 Ph.D. students and 16 postdoctoral researchers, guiding them toward successful careers in both academia and industry. He has led $36.5 million in awarded research and has served as a Co-Investigator for an additional $67.3 million from NSF, DOE, the European Commission, EPSRC, SFI, IBM, Cisco, and Sony.

Educational Leadership:

As an educator, Dimitrios is committed to shaping the next generation of computer scientists through his instruction in Computer Organization, Systems and Networking Capstone, Multiprocessor Programming, and Warehouse-Scale Computing. He has taught various courses in Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, and Parallel Programming and has been recognized numerous times for teaching excellence by his students and peers. His lectures have also been used as teaching material in industry research labs.

Professional Service and Leadership

In service to the academic community, Dimitrios has held leadership positions with several prestigious computer systems conferences and journals. Since June 2024, he has chaired the Steering Committee of the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS). He chaired the Steering Committee of the IEEE International Conference on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software in 2022 and 2023. He served as Program Chair of ICS in 2022 and 2023 and of IEEE CCGRID in 2014. Additionally, he was the Program Area Chair of SC in 2014, IPDPS in 2011, and ICPP in 2007. He also served as General Chair of IEEE ISPASS in 2018 and IEEE Cluster in 2010 and 2018. Dimitrios is 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:

In his administrative career, Dimitrios has held key academic leadership positions, 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 promoting diversity and inclusion: the (Athena Swan Silver and Investors in People Silver). The School also achieved the highest-ever research expenditures and unprecedented graduate and undergraduate student enrollment, establishing itself as a significant hub for computing workforce education and research excellence in the UK and Ireland. Dimitrios currently serves on the CRA Leadership Academy Committee.

Current Research and Opportunities:

Dimitrios 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 promote convergent research that co-designs computing system stacks alongside engineering artifacts to tackle significant scientific challenges and urgent societal needs. Through this work, he continues to build bridges between principles of scalable computing systems and practical applications that address real-world problems.