EGN NEWS DESK
Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of Social Sciences within the Department of Political Science, has been named the brand new director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), efficient July 1.
“Fotini is well-positioned to information IDSS into the following chapter. With her tenure because the director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center and as an affiliate director of IDSS since 2020, she has actively solid connections between the social sciences, information science, and computation,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I eagerly anticipate the methods wherein she is going to advance and champion IDSS in alignment with the spirit and mission of the Schwarzman College of Computing.”
“Fotini’s profound experience as a social scientist and her adept use of information science, computational instruments, and novel methodologies to know the dynamics of societal evolution throughout various fields, makes her a pure match to steer IDSS,” says Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Christia’s analysis has centered on problems with battle and cooperation within the Muslim world, for which she has performed fieldwork in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, the Palestinian Territories, and Yemen, amongst others. More just lately, her analysis has been directed at inspecting tips on how to successfully combine synthetic intelligence instruments in public coverage.
She was appointed the director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) and an affiliate director of IDSS in October 2020. SSRC, an interdisciplinary heart housed inside IDSS within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, focuses on the research of high-impact, advanced societal challenges that form our world.
As a part of IDSS, she is co-organizer of a cross-disciplinary analysis effort, the Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism. Bringing collectively school and researchers from all of MIT’s 5 faculties and the school, the initiative builds on in depth social science literature on systemic racism and makes use of huge information to develop and harness computational instruments that may assist impact structural and normative change towards racial fairness throughout housing, well being care, policing, and social media. Christia can also be chair of IDSS’s doctoral program in Social and Engineering Systems.
Christia is the creator of “Alliance Formation in Civil War” (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was awarded the Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics, the Lepgold Prize for Best Book in International Relations, and a Distinguished Book Award from the International Studies Association. She is co-editor with Graeme Blair (University of California, Los Angeles) and Jeremy Weinstein (incoming dean at Harvard Kennedy School) of “Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust,” forthcoming in August 2024 with Cambridge University Press.
Her analysis has additionally appeared in Science, Nature Human Behavior, Review of Economic Studies, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, NeurIPs, Communications Medicine, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, American Political Science Review, and Annual Review of Political Science, amongst different journals. Her opinion items have been revealed in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, amongst different shops.
A local of Greece, the place she grew up within the port metropolis of Salonika, Christia moved to the United States to attend faculty at Columbia University. She graduated magna cum laude in 2001 with a joint BA in economics–operations analysis and an MA in worldwide affairs. She joined the MIT school in 2008 after receiving her PhD in public coverage from Harvard University.
Christia succeeds Noelle Selin, a professor in IDSS and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. Selin has led IDSS as interim director for the 2023-24 tutorial 12 months since July 2023, following Professor Martin Wainwright.
“I’m extremely grateful to Noelle for serving as interim director this 12 months. Her contributions on this function, in addition to her time main the Technology and Policy Program, have been invaluable. I’m delighted she is going to stay a part of the IDSS neighborhood as a college member,” says Huttenlocher.
