Dr. Frederica Darema, a member of the Senior Executive Service, is the Director of Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Arlington, Virginia. She guides the management of the entire basic research investment for the Air Force. Dr. Darema leads a staff of 200 scientists, engineers and administrators in Arlington, Virginia, and foreign technology offices in London, Tokyo and Santiago, Chile. Each year, AFOSR selects, sponsors and manages revolutionary basic research that impacts the future Air Force. AFOSR interacts with leading scientists and engineers throughout the world to identify breakthrough opportunities; actively manages a $510 million investment portfolio encompassing the best of these opportunities; and transitions the resulting discoveries to other components of the Air Force Research Laboratory, to defense industries and to other federal agencies. The office’s annual investment in basic research is distributed among more than 200 leading academic institutions worldwide, 100 industry-based contracts, and more than 250 internal AFRL research efforts.
Dr. Darema is a graduate of the University of Athens, Greece, and the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of California at Davis, where she attended as a Fulbright Scholar and a Distinguished Scholar.
After Physics Research Associate positions at the University of Pittsburgh and Brookhaven National Laboratory, she received an American Physics Society Industrial Postdoctoral Fellowship and became a Technical Staff Member in the Nuclear Sciences Department at Schlumberger-Doll Research. Subsequently, at the T.J. Watson IBM Research Center she was a Research Staff Member and Research Group Manager. While at IBM, she also served in the IBM Corporate Strategy Group examining and helping to set corporatewide strategies. From 1996 to 1998, she completed a two-year interagency assignment at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Before being appointed to her present position, Dr. Darema was the Director of the Directorate for Information, Mathematics and Life Sciences, at AFOSR. Prior to AFOSR, Dr. Darema was at the National Science Foundation where she held executive positions as Senior Science and Technology Advisor and Senior Science Analyst in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. In that capacity she initiated and led multi-directorate and multi-agency initiatives that fostered groundbreaking multidisciplinary research directions in computer sciences and in applications modeling and simulation. Dr. Darema has served on many scientific committees in the United States and internationally. She has an extensive record of publications and has given numerous keynote speeches and other presentations in national and international professional forums. Dr. Darema's scientific and technical accomplishments include seminal contributions in the parallel high-performance computing field, and specifically in: programming models; parallel algorithms; applications modeling and instrumentation systems; and systems performance-engineering methods for the design of applications and software for parallel and distributed systems.
EDUCATION
1969 Bachelor of Science, School of Physics and Mathematics, University of Athens, Greece
1972 Master of Science, Theoretical Nuclear Physics, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago
1976 Doctor of Philosophy, Theoretical Nuclear Physics, University of California, Davis
CAREER CHRONOLOGY
1. 1977, Research Associate, Physics Department, University of Pittsburgh, Pa.
2. 1978–1979, Research Associate, Nuclear Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, N.Y.
3. 1980–1982, Technical Staff Member, Nuclear Sciences Department, Schlumberger-Doll Research Laboratory, Ridgefield, Conn.
4. 1982–1994, Research Staff Member, Computer Sciences Department; in 1987 was appointed Research Group Manager, IBM Research on Parallel Applications, Systems and Software Products Department, T.J. Watson IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, N.Y.; and in 1991–1993, served as Technical Staff Member, in the IBM Corporate Technical Strategy Development Group, IBM Corporate Headquarters, Armonk, N.Y.
5. 1994–1998, Senior Science Adviser, Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate and Computer Information Sciences and Engineering Directorate, National Science Foundation, Arlington, Virginia; in 1996–1998, intergovernmental assignment as Program Manager, Information Technology Office, DARPA, Arlington, Va.
6. 1998–2007, Senior Science and Technology Adviser, Computer and Networking Division, Computer, Information Science and Engineering Directorate, National Science Foundation, Arlington, Va.
7. 2007–2010, Senior Science Analyst, Office of the Assistant Director, Computer, Information Science and Engineering Directorate, National Science Foundation, Arlington, Va.
8. 2010–2016, Director, Directorate for Information, Mathematics and Life Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Arlington, Va.
9. 2016–present, Director, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Arlington, Va.
AWARDS AND HONORS
Fulbright Scholar
Distinguished Scholar, University of California, Davis
Fellow, American Physical Society Industrial Postdoctoral
Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Fellow, Washington Academy of Sciences
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Award (Outstanding Leadership and Contributions to the Engineering Profession)
PUBLICATIONS
1. First-author, "Simulated Annealing on Shared Memory Parallel Systems," IBM Journal of R&D, May 1987
2. "Parallel Applications Development for shared Memory Systems," Proceedings of the 1986 IBM Europe Institute, Oberlech, Austria, August 1986; North-Holland, 1988
3. F. Darema “Engineering/Scientific and Commercial Applications: differences, similarities and unification”, invited paper, Proceedings of the HERMIS’94 Conference on Mathematics and Infomatics, 1994
4. "Performance Engineering Technology for the Design, Management and Control of Computing Systems," International Journal of High-Performance Computing, V.13, No.3, Fall 1999
5. "New Software Architecture for Complex Applications Development and Run Time Support," International Journal of High-Performance Computing on Programming Environments, Clusters and Computational Grids For Scientific Computing, V.14, No.3, Fall 2000
6. "Performance Evaluation with Real Applications," Invited Book Chapter, Performance Evaluation book, MIT Press, 2001
7. "Grid Computing and Beyond: The Context of Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems," Proceedings of the IEEE, Special Issue on Grid Computing, March 2005
8. "The SPMD Computational Model, Past Present and Future," Invited Book Chapter, Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing, Springer, 2011
9. Co-author, “Orchestrating the Internet of Things”, 1st International Conference of Internet of Things, Big Data and Security, 2016, Rome, Italy; and paper (submitted) The International Journal of Information Management, December 2016.
(Current as of May 2023)