Asu Ozdaglar (Co-chair) is Mathworks Professor and head of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Deputy Dean for Academics in the Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing.
Ozdaglar completed her BS in electrical engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, and her masters’ and PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. Her research expertise includes optimization theory and algorithms, game theory, machine learning and network analysis with applications in social, economic and financial networks. Her recent research focuses on designing incentives and algorithms for data-driven online systems with many diverse human-machine participants.
Ozdaglar is the recipient of a Microsoft Fellowship, the MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching Award, the NSF Career Award, the Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council, the Spira Teaching Award, and Keithley, Distinguished School of Engineering and Mathworks professorships. She is an IEEE fellow and was selected as an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians.
A principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Ozdaglar’s educational contributions to MIT are substantial. She has developed a range of graduate and undergraduate courses, including a graduate-level game theory subject and an undergraduate course on networks that is jointly listed with the Department of Economics. She likewise served as a champion of curriculum innovations through her role in launching the new undergraduate major in 6-14: Computer Science, Economics and Data Science, and the creation of Course 11-6: Urban Science and Planning with Computer Science, a new program that offers students an opportunity to investigate some of the most pressing problems and challenges facing urban areas today. Ozdaglar was the inaugural area co-editor for the area entitled “Games, Information and Networks” in the journal Operations Research. She is the co-author of the book entitled “Convex Analysis and Optimization” (Athena Scientific, 2003), is listed on three patents, and is the coauthor of well over two hundred chapters, papers, talks and seminars.