Abdella Battou is Chief, Smart Connected Systems, in the Communication Technology Laboratory (CTL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He also leads the NIST Cloud Computing Program. Prior to joining CTL, he served as the Division Chief of the Advanced Network Technologies Division from 2012 to 2021 in NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory.
From 2009 to 2012, Abdella served as the Executive Director of the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX) GigaPop founded by University of Maryland, George Washington University, Georgetown University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute. From 2000 to 2009, he was Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Research and Development for Lambda OpticalSystems, where he was responsible for overseeing the company's system architectures, hardware design and software development teams. Additionally, he served as senior research scientist for the Naval Research Laboratory's high speed networking group, Center for Computational Sciences from 1992 to 2000.