Alexander “Sasha” Rakhlin PhD ’06, the Distinguished Professor in Information, Programs, and Society on the MIT Institute for Information, Programs, and Society (IDSS); a professor of mind and cognitive sciences at MIT; and a principal investigator within the MIT Laboratory for Info and Determination Programs (LIDS) has been named the subsequent director of the MIT Statistics and Information Science Heart (SDSC).
Rakhlin succeeds Ankur Moitra, the Norbert Wiener Professor of Arithmetic, affiliate director of the IDSS, and a college member within the MIT Division of Electrical Engineering and Pc Science (EECS) who has been SDSC director since 2021. Philippe Rigollet, the Cecil and Ida Inexperienced Distinguished Professor of Arithmetic and a core school member in IDSS, additionally served as interim director in 2024-25.
“Sasha is without doubt one of the sharpest theoretical minds working in statistics and machine studying as we speak, and in addition one of the crucial devoted mentors I do know,” says Fotini Christia, the Ford Worldwide Professor of the Social Sciences and director of IDSS, which homes SDSC. “He has helped prepare a complete era of interdisciplinary students by means of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Statistics (IDPS), whereas his personal analysis retains pushing the boundaries. The SDSC couldn’t ask for a extra becoming chief.”
Rakhlin is the inaugural holder of the Distinguished Professorship in Information, Programs, and Society, an endowed chair created in 2025 by the generosity and imaginative and prescient of IDSS professor Richard “Dick” Larson, an “MIT lifer” and pioneer in operations analysis, queueing principle, and system optimization.
“I’m honored to tackle this function,” says Rakhlin. “The power of the Statistics and Information Science Heart has at all times been its individuals — college students, postdocs, and school from throughout MIT who deliver sharply completely different views to essentially the most fascinating issues of the day in statistics, machine studying, and AI. My purpose is to assist that neighborhood because it takes on the continuously evolving questions reshaping the sector.”
Rakhlin has been related to the Statistics and Information Science Heart as a visiting professor since 2016, earlier than formally becoming a member of MIT in 2018 within the Division of Mind and Cognitive Sciences and IDSS. Because the preliminary chair of the Interdisciplinary PhD in Statistics program on the SDSC, Rakhlin has seen the profitable protection of over 75 IDPS PhD college students throughout a wide range of departments at MIT, together with IDSS’ personal Social and Engineering Programs program.
“I’ve been fascinated by machine studying since my PhD work greater than 20 years in the past, drawn by its lovely connections to statistics, likelihood, algorithms, optimization, and sport principle,” says Rakhlin. “On the Statistics and Information Science Heart, I work alongside colleagues who share this fascination and pursue these connections in lots of instructions. The current revolution in AI is extending this net into the sciences; it guarantees to speed up discovery, and it raises new questions for statistics. Answering them calls for a rigorous science of the instruments themselves. As AI enters drugs, vitality, and public life, its security and safety are, at their core, statistical and mathematical questions: quantifying uncertainty, offering ensures, understanding failure, and resisting manipulation.”
As Rakhlin places it, the SDSC is constructed for this second. “Statistics is a shared language throughout MIT,” he provides. “By the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Statistics, the middle connects college students and school from economics and political science to physics and engineering. Collaborations in areas from biology to nuclear fusion have proven how statistical pondering accelerates science itself.”
As director, considered one of his objectives is to deepen these interdisciplinary connections. He hopes to assist make SDSC the Institute’s dwelling for the rigorous foundations of information science and AI, and a bridge to the scientific and societal questions the place these foundations are most wanted.
Rakhlin obtained his bachelor’s levels in arithmetic and pc science from Cornell College, and doctoral diploma from MIT. He was a postdoc on the College of California at Berkeley in EECS earlier than becoming a member of the College of Pennsylvania, the place he was an affiliate professor within the Division of Statistics and co-director of the Penn Analysis in Machine Studying heart.
