I am the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I am also Director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), Director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC), Academic Chair of the doctoral program in Social and Engineering Systems (SES) at MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing and an affiliated faculty with the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Center for Ocean Engineering at MIT. My research bridges data science and computation, by examining how to effectively integrate computational and AI tools in complex sociotechnical problems.
My past research has focused on issues of conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world, and I have conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Iran, the Palestinian Territories, Syria, and Yemen. I am the author 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. I am also co-editor with Graeme Blair (UCLA) and Jeremy Weinstein (Stanford) of “Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust” (Cambridge University Press, 2024). I was an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a Harvard Academy Fellow. My articles have 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, Journal of Politics and Annual Review of Political Science among other journals. My opinion pieces have been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe among other outlets. For my research, I have received support from MURI and DARPA grants, as well as from Google, the International Growth Center, the Russell Sage Foundation, USAID, CIDA, the UN, and the World Bank among others. I graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University in 2001 with a joint BA in Economics–Operations Research and an MA in International Affairs. I joined the MIT faculty in July 2008 after receiving my PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University that year.
To give you a sense of where I carried out my fieldwork, here are some photos from the field in Najaf in Iraq, Aden in Yemen, Maidan Saleh in Saudi Arabia, as well as from Balkh, Daikundi, and Nangarhar in Afghanistan.
