Ali Jadbabaie

Ali Jadbabaie is the JR East Professor of Engineering in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Associate Director of the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center at MIT. He is a recognized expert in the fields of network science, decision and control theory, and multi-agent coordination. Prof. Jadbabaie joined MIT from Penn, where he was the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Network Science in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering.

Through his highly-cited and influential research, Prof. Jadbabaie has made fundamental contributions in optimization-based control, multi-agent coordination and consensus, network science, and network economics. He has won several prestigious awards, and his students and postdoctoral scholars have become professors within electrical, computer, and mechanical engineering departments in top universities and in eminent business schools.

He was a postdoctoral scholar at Yale University before joining the faculty at Penn in July 2002. He held secondary appointments in computer and information science and operations and information management in the Wharton School.

A former member of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) Lab at Penn, Prof. Jadbabaie is also the co-founder and director of the Raj and Neera Singh Program in Networked and Social Systems Engineering (NETS), a new undergraduate interdisciplinary degree program focused on network science and engineering, operations research, computer science, and social sciences. He is also a faculty member of the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences at Penn and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at Penn’s law school. He is a lead of a Department of Defense-funded Multidisciplinary Research Initiative (MURI) titled, “The Evolution of Cultural Norms and Dynamics of Sociopolitical Change,” which involves MIT faculty from LIDS and the departments of Political Science and Economics, as well as faculty from Penn, Stanford, and Cornell.