Fotini Christia named next IDSS Director

It is a great pleasure to announce that Fotini Christia has been named the next Director of IDSS, effective July 1, 2024. Christia is the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science. Her research has focused on issues of conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world, and more recently on societal impacts of advanced computing technologies. In taking on this leadership role, she is excited about enhancing and promoting IDSS in the spirit and mission of the Schwarzman College of Computing.

Christia is the author of the award-winning book “Alliance Formation in Civil War” (Cambridge University Press, 2012). She is co-editor with Graeme Blair from UCLA and Jeremy Weinstein from Stanford of “Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust”, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (2024). Her research has also appeared in Science, Nature Human Behavior, Review of Economic Studies, NeurIPs, Communications Medicine, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, American Political Science Review, and Annual Review of Political Science among other journals.

She graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University in 2001 with a joint BA in Economics–Operations Research and an MA in International Affairs. Christia joined the MIT faculty in July 2008 after receiving her PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University that year.

Christia takes over for Noelle Selin, who has served as IDSS Interim Director since founding director Munther Dahleh stepped down last year.