Munther Dahleh

Munther Dahleh was appointed director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, effective July 1, 2015. (See MIT News article with full details.) He was previously the associate department head of EECS. He is also a member MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).

Prof. Dahleh joined LIDS as an assistant professor of EECS in 1987 and became a full professor in 1998. He spent the spring of 1993 as a visiting professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, and has held consulting positions with several companies in the U.S. and abroad.

Prof. Dahleh is internationally known for his fundamental contributions to robust control theory, computational methods for controller design, the interplay between information and control, the fundamental limits of learning and decision in networked systems, and the detection and mitigation of systemic risk in interconnected and networked systems.

In particular, his research interests include:

• Networked Systems: Foundational theory for the interaction between physical and information networks, Information propagation, distributed decisions, learning network structure from data.
• Social Networks: Information cascades in stochastic networks, opinion dynamics, global games in modeling outcomes of crises
• Systemic Risk: The development of a foundational theory for the early detection and control of systemic risk resulting from idiosyncratic disturbance affecting components of a networked system
• Transportation Systems: Dynamic models of congestion under disruptions, dependence of fragility on network topology, cascaded failures, value of side information on performance