Dr. Sankar Basu is a permanent program Director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). Prior to NSF he was at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, and on the faculty of the Stevens Institute of Technology. He has visited the Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, and the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) for extended periods. During 2012 he served as an Embassy Science Fellow at the US Embassy in Berlin, Germany, on detail to the US Department of State.

At NSF, his primary responsibility includes Design Automation for Micro and Nano-Electronic systems. Most recently, he co-chaired a federal committee on a Nanotechnology-Inspired Grand Challenge for Future Computing. During his tenure at NSF, he has been involved with several joint programs with the Semiconductor Research Consortium (SRC), including the Energy-Efficient Computing: from Devices to Architectures (E2CDA) program in response to the federal Grand Challenge mentioned above.

Dr. Basu's own research interests had been in the general area of nano-computing circuits, systems, and machine learning. He authored over 100 refereed publications and a dozen patents, edited several volumes, and has given keynote talks at a number of international conferences. He served on editorial boards of about 10 journals including being the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, and currently serves on the editorial board of Proceedings of the IEEE. He has organized and chaired several major conferences including a NATO Advanced Study Institute on Statistical Learning and Applications, resulting in a co-edited the book, Advances in Learning Theory: Methods, Models, and Applications. 

He is a Fellow of the IEEEand AAAS. In 2011, SRC recognized him with an award for Enhancing its Mission through Collaboration.