Asu Ozdaglar is the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and, effective Jan. 1, 2018, the head of MIT’s EECS department.
Prof. Ozdaglar has been on the MIT faculty since 2003. A former associate department head in EECS, she became the interim department head in July 2017, succeeding Anantha Chandrakasan, who became dean of the School of Engineering. She has also been director of the Laboratory for Information Decision Systems (LIDS) and associate director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Her research focuses on problems that arise in the analysis and optimization of large-scale dynamic multi-agent networked systems, including communication networks, transportation networks, and social and economic networks.
She is a past recipient of a Microsoft fellowship, the MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching award, the NSF Career award, the 2008 Donald P. Eckman award of the American Automatic Control Council, and the Class of 1943 Career Development Chair. She was the inaugural Steven and Renee Innovation Fellow, and won the 2014 Spira teaching award. She served on the Board of Governors of the Control System Society in 2010 and was an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. She is the inaugural area co-editor for a new area for the journal Operations Research, entitled “Games, Information and Networks,” and she is the co-author of Convex Analysis and Optimization (Athena Scientific, 2003).
Ozdaglar received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Middle East Technical University, in Ankara, Turkey, in 1996, and master’s and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1998 and 2003.