Wise Words
Bob Wise ’86 forged his path from William & Mary’s computer lab to Nvidia, the world’s leading artificial intelligence computing company.
June 10, 2026
Story By
Tina Eshleman
Bob Wise still has his first computer, a 1979 Apple II that sits in his home office. It’s the same computer on which he taught himself programming as a homeschooled student living on his family’s farm about 20 miles west of Williamsburg. He brought it to William & Mary when he moved into a residence hall at age 16 in the spring of 1983.
While technology has advanced light years since then, the original equipment holds sentimental value for Wise. He is now vice president for engineering and operations at Nvidia, where he leads infrastructure management for artificial intelligence researchers. The world’s most valuable company, Nvidia is worth more than $5 trillion.
Nvidia designs and sells advanced computer chips, systems and AI software frameworks that allow high performance computing across numerous industries. Its platforms support data centers, large language models, autonomous vehicles, gaming and robotics through hardware and software integration.
“Access to new technology matters,” Wise told the audience at William & Mary’s School of Computing, Data Sciences & Physics Class of 1975 Speaker Series on April 23. For him, access to that first computer opened the door to independent exploration, which then led him to pursue computer science studies at the university.
Wise, who lives in Auburn, Washington, with his wife, Heather, and has four children, credits William & Mary with helping him develop not only his technological capabilities, but also a broad knowledge base and writing, communication and analytical skills that have advanced his career.
“Few technology businesses are only about the technology,” he says. “Every technology business is a global business and a people business. Having a wider understanding of the world is critical. Understanding other cultures, other languages and the way the world works is so important to everyone. A liberal arts education really helps people prepare for that.”
Seek Out Opportunities
By his own description, Wise was a computer nerd when he arrived at William & Mary: “I was very, very young and green.”
Wise’s parents had decided to teach him and his two sisters at home after realizing when they were early elementary school students that they were struggling in school because they were bored. Wise’s mother, Jessie Wise, became a leader in homeschool education and later co-authored the best-selling book “The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home” with his younger sister Susan Wise Bauer M.A. ’94, Ph.D. ’07. Bauer, who lives on the farm where she and Bob grew up, founded the Well-Trained Mind Academy and the Well-Trained Mind Press and taught literature and composition at William & Mary for 15 years.
Wise and his siblings thrived in the homeschool environment, taking trips to the Williamsburg Regional Library and checking out as many books as they were allowed, and later exploring Swem Library at William & Mary. They also went on field trips, including one to visit their state representative, then-Del. George Grayson J.D. ’76, P ’96, who was also a longtime W&M government professor.
But by age 15, Wise wanted a new challenge. He had taken the PSAT and done well, so he met with the dean of admission at William & Mary and asked if he could take some college classes.
“He said, ‘Well, you’re kind of young, but I’ll let you in part time. And if you do OK, then we’ll talk about whether you can come in full time.’ So I took two classes, and I did OK. I went back, and he let me in full time.”
One of those first classes was with Grayson. “I did a thread of government classes after that,” he says. “It was just so amazing to me that someone could be a professor and be involved in state government.”
Despite his parents’ reservations about his age, Wise moved into campus housing and jumped right into a full course load. At the time, computer science was a fairly new program, later splitting off from the math department in 1984.
“I lived for being in the computer labs,” he says. “I programmed all the time, and it was really just the best possible thing for me.”
Find People to Learn From
Wise had taught himself to program on his home computer, using books and magazines as references. His father, James “Jay” Wise Jr., who was a family physician and chief of emergency medicine at a local hospital, bought him a computer in part so that he could help with automating medical office records.
“I was writing lots of spaghetti code and I’d gotten in over my head,” Wise says. “I was trying to build bigger programs than I could really understand.”
He saw an opportunity at William & Mary to take his programming abilities to the next level. As a freshman, however, he had to get permission to take a computer programming class, which typically enrolled more experienced students. Deborah Smith Noonan M.S. ’81, a new faculty member at the time, accepted him into her CS 141 computational problem-solving class based on his enthusiasm and the programming he’d already done on his own.
“We started talking about structured programming, and I know structured programming is kind of an old thing now, but for me, it was amazing,” Wise recalls. “It was like the lights came on — oh, there’s a different way to approach this. I appreciated her for being so kind to me as a pretty immature young student and letting me take the class, and I took other classes with her as well. I would say she had the biggest impact on me.”
Noonan, now a senior lecturer emerita, attended Wise’s talk in April, which coincided with the dedication of Integrated Science Center 4 (ISC4), home of the new School of Computing, Data Sciences & Physics. She recalls that Wise was an excellent student. She also remembers him as a bit of a practical joker who teamed up with his friend Jim Jones ’82, M.S. ’86 to pull a memorable prank.
“They took magnetic tape and strung it all the way down the main hallway at Jones Hall over the weekend, from side to side, up and down,” she says, laughing. “Then to make matters worse, they put this sign up that said, ‘This is an art project, do not remove.’ The janitors came in and they didn’t know what to do, so they left it. On Monday, no one could get in.”
In addition to the work experience Wise gained by providing information technology support for his father, he assisted William & Mary faculty members with technology needs.
“One of the business professors had written a large amount of Fortran code and needed help optimizing it,” Wise says. “He was doing things that I didn’t even quite understand, but I was able to take his code and help get it smaller and make it run better so that his large analysis jobs were able to run.”
One summer, Wise set up an office in the business school to do IT consulting, and during the academic year, he worked at the computing center help desk in Jones Hall.
“I put my nerdy skills to good use and made money that way,” he says. “One of the jobs I did then, I was making $25 an hour while I was a student doing programming work, which in those days was a lot of money.” For comparison, the hourly minimum wage in Virginia in 1986, the year Wise graduated, was $2.65.
Noonan said she did not know until recently how far Wise’s career has taken him. Prior to his role at Nvidia, he also held leadership positions at Hewlett-Packard, MTN Satellite Communications, Samsung, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.
“I was blown away,” Noonan says. “I’m very proud.”
Consider the Whole Picture
Wise describes the guiding philosophy behind his career like this: “The point is to build things that people use and find useful, and the more people, the better. The bigger the impact, the more fun it is.”
To ensure his work has as much impact as possible, he has learned to consider the whole picture. Otherwise, he says, a lot of time and energy can go into developing something that people aren’t ready to use. He wrote about such an example in an article published on Medium titled “The Most Innovative Thing I Did Was a Failure.”
In that case, he was working at MTN Satellite Communications on a way to provide less expensive and more effective internet service to cruise ships and other maritime vessels. In doing so, he encountered resistance from stakeholders whose revenue was tied to the previous system.
“The mistake I made there was going and building a bunch of technology that was really amazing without understanding that it takes a whole company’s worth of people to do the whole job,” he says. “To be successful as an engineer, you need to have people that are being successful as salespeople, as marketing people.”
He took that lesson when he went to work for Amazon Web Services (AWS). “They hired me to start a new business for them, which is an amazing opportunity,” Wise says. He led the teams that built and operated Kubernetes, a kind of air-traffic control system that allows large-scale cloud applications like streaming services to operate without crashing. He was also responsible for the Amazon-wide Open Source Program Office.
Although his primary job was to build a product and make sure it ran efficiently, “I spent a lot of time making sure that we were doing the marketing well, that we were doing the sales well,” he says. “It was a very successful business.”
In his role at Nvidia, he draws on experiences throughout his career to make what promises to be the biggest impact yet. He leads one of the teams at Nvidia working on software for Vera Rubin, described as the next generation of AI, which Nvidia introduced on March 16. Named in honor of an American astronomer, the platform includes seven chips designed to operate together as one AI supercomputer that the company says will increase computing power tenfold over the next decade. Shipments to major cloud providers such as Microsoft and Google are scheduled in July.
“I’m super happy to have a job where I’m able to bring some of my expertise in cloud computing and building big distributed systems to help Nvidia work and evolve that world, but at the same time be at this amazing place that has such an impact on the world right now,” Wise says.
Nail the Fundamentals
When he began his studies at William & Mary, Wise thought that he would go into electrical engineering.
“My idea of being involved in computers was building hardware, building chips,” he says. “One of the ways you do that is to study physics and then go into electrical engineering as a graduate student. My plan was — and I think this is still a good path — nail the fundamentals by getting a physics degree and then go into electrical engineering as a graduate student.”
As he took more programming classes, his interest shifted toward computer science. “I woke up one day and said maybe I shouldn’t be doing a physics major and go into hardware,” he says. “Maybe what I should do is software. I switched majors to computer science and haven’t looked back since. I guess the circle is complete because now I work for the most amazing computer hardware company on the planet. I got back there eventually, although what I do for Nvidia is all software based.”
As the youngest student in his first computer class, Wise formed a bond with Jones, who was the oldest, having graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology and returned to pursue computer science as a graduate student. “Jim very much took me under his wing, and I appreciate the mentoring and the kindness that he showed me during those days,” Wise says.
Wise remains in contact with Jones as well as other computer science alumni such as Farooq Butt ’86, who traveled from Austin, Texas, to attend Wise’s talk and the ISC4 dedication, and Doug Schmidt ’84, M.A. ’86, dean of the School of Computing, Data Sciences & Physics (CDSP), William & Mary’s first new school in more than 50 years.
Wise recently joined the CDSP advisory board, where he anticipates assisting his alma mater with positioning students for success in an AI-dominated world. This spring, Forbes again included William & Mary on its list of “The New Ivies” for the university’s excellence in career readiness and leadership in AI adoption. (See magazine.wm.edu/new-ivies.)
Butt says the adaptability Wise has shown throughout his career — moving from telecommunications to satellite communications to cloud computing to AI — is a testament to his education at William & Mary.
“Things change, but what you need to have is the ability to learn and think, and that’s probably the most valuable thing you get from an education at William & Mary,” says Butt, a former vice president for business development and strategy for the End User Computing Solutions Group at Dell and founder of FMB Consulting.
“Bob’s innate intellectual chops in computer science coupled with the kind of flexibility he developed at William & Mary is a wonderful combination,” Butt says. “Usually people will burrow down into one thing, and what’s cool with Bob is that he’s managed to have an impact across so many different fields in computer science.”
Schmidt says Wise influenced his decision to pivot from sociology toward a career in computer science as a graduate student at William & Mary.
“Bob embodies the magic of people and place,” Schmidt told those gathered at the ISC4 dedication ceremony, which took place before Wise’s talk. “During our time here in the mid-1980s, his friendship and mentoring helped shape the course of my own career in computing in ways I could not have imagined at the time. His journey from this campus to the forefront of technological innovation stands as a powerful testament to the enduring impact of the William & Mary community.”
The speaker series that featured Wise is made possible through a 50th reunion gift from the Class of 1975, whose commitment to fostering innovation, interdisciplinary learning and student engagement continues to enrich the academic experience at W&M.
“As the CDSP evolves from excellence to preeminence, the series will bring leading scholars and researchers to campus to engage students, faculty and the broader community in cutting-edge ideas, intellectual vigor and future-focused conversations of significance to this data-rich world,” says James “Van” Black ’75, speaking on behalf of members of his class’s 50th reunion committee.
Pay It Forward
During his visit to campus, Wise enjoyed reconnecting with classmates and faculty members. He marveled at the new Makerspaces at William & Mary and cheered the achievements of the autonomous boat racing team, winner of the 2026 Promoting Electric Propulsion (PEP) autonomous division. He also offered informal career insights over pizza with students during a lunchtime roundtable that he called the highlight of his day.
Among the students was Olabisi Bashorun ’27, a computer science major and Monroe Scholar. She says, “It has been very inspiring to see someone from William & Mary get so high up in the world of technology.”
Celia Schaefers ’28, a Monroe Scholar who is double majoring in computer science and computational and applied mathematics and statistics, adds that “hearing from someone who has their finger on the pulse” of the industry gives her studies more tangible meaning. She was particularly struck by Wise’s work to bring Kubernetes to Amazon Web Services: “He’s had such a big part in expanding a service that a lot of people use on a daily basis.”
Wise says he looks forward to returning to his alma mater this fall for the CDSP advisory board meetings and he hopes to have more opportunities to talk with students.
“If I had to give advice to my younger self, it would have been to be a little bit more expansive in my own education: Understand economics a bit better. Take an accounting class,” he says. “Pay a little bit more attention to the next step ahead and what you’re going to need in order to get there.”