A milestone for SES: Ian Schneider’s successful dissertation defense

Pictured: Ian Schneider (center) and his fellow SES students. Back l to r: Max Vilgalys, Leon Yao, Hanwei Li, Erin Walk, Andy Haupt, Paolo Bertolotti, Bomin Jiang, Yunzong Xu. Middle l to r: Rui Sun, Minghao Qiu, Hussein Mozannar, Cate Heine, Ian Schneider, Arnab Sarker, Qi Yang, Jinglong Zhao, Yan Jin, Amir Tohidi Kalorazi. Front: Chin-Chia Hsu, Eaman Jahani, Yi Sun, Manon Revel, Sirui Li, Bernardo García Bulle Bueno. Not pictured: Marie Charpignon, Dimitris Konomis, Manxi Wu, Mengying Wu, Yuan Yuan. Photo: Christopher Harting.

IDSS congratulates Ian Schneider on the successful defense of his dissertation ‘Market Design Opportunities for an Evolving Power System.’

This success marks a major milestone for the Social & Engineering Systems doctoral program: its first defense, which puts Schneider on a path to be the first SES graduate (officially in February of 2020).

“We wanted to address complex societal challenges that lie at the intersection of engineering and computing, and social sciences and economics,” remarked IDSS director Munther Dahleh, who also chaired the dissertation committee. “The whole idea is that these theses have to tackle these problems in a rigorous and systematic way … You do quite a bit of analytical work to either analyze or design mechanisms that make sense for both people and the systems at the same time.”

Schneider is also an alum of the Technology and Policy Program (TPP) and a Siebel Scholar. He will be joining Google as a Data Scientist working on renewable energy initiatives.