Alexander “Sasha” Rakhlin PhD ’06, the Distinguished Professor in Knowledge, Methods, and Society on the MIT Institute for Knowledge, Methods, and Society (IDSS); a professor of mind and cognitive sciences at MIT; and a principal investigator within the MIT Laboratory for Data and Determination Methods (LIDS) has been named the subsequent director of the MIT Statistics and Knowledge Science Middle (SDSC).
Rakhlin succeeds Ankur Moitra, the Norbert Wiener Professor of Arithmetic, affiliate director of the IDSS, and a school 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 college member in IDSS, additionally served as interim director in 2024-25.
“Sasha is among the sharpest theoretical minds working in statistics and machine studying right now, and likewise some of the 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 practice a complete era of interdisciplinary students via 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 Knowledge, Methods, 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 position,” says Rakhlin. “The energy of the Statistics and Knowledge Science Middle has all the time been its folks — college students, postdocs, and college from throughout MIT who carry sharply totally different views to probably the most attention-grabbing issues of the day in statistics, machine studying, and AI. My purpose is to assist that group because it takes on the always evolving questions reshaping the sphere.”
Rakhlin has been related to the Statistics and Knowledge Science Middle 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 quite a lot of departments at MIT, together with IDSS’ personal Social and Engineering Methods 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 Knowledge Science Middle, I work alongside colleagues who share this fascination and pursue these connections in lots of instructions. The latest 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, power, 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 way of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Statistics, the middle connects college students and college from economics and political science to physics and engineering. Collaborations in areas from biology to nuclear fusion have proven how statistical considering accelerates science itself.”
As director, considered one of his targets is to deepen these interdisciplinary connections. He hopes to assist make SDSC the Institute’s residence for the rigorous foundations of knowledge 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.
