Martin Wainwright named next IDSS director

Martin Wainwright has been named the next director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), effective July 1, 2023.

Wainwright is the Cecil H. Green Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Mathematics, a member of the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC), and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). He is a widely recognized leader in statistics, machine learning, information theory, and optimization — in both research and education.

Wainwright believes strongly in the value of theoretical, experimental, and computational approaches to research, in facilitating connections between these approaches, and in the importance of both practical and academic impact. In taking on this leadership role, he is excited about and committed to the importance of building up the human and institutional behavior component of IDSS while strengthening initiatives in both policy and statistics, and to collaborations within IDSS, across MIT, and beyond.

Wainwright received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and doctoral degree in EECS from MIT, where he developed his thesis at LIDS.

He has received a number of awards and recognition including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, best paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the IEEE Communications Society, and the IEEE Information Theory and Communication Societies, the Medallion Lectureship and Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the COPSS Presidents’ Award from the Joint Statistical Societies. He was a Section Lecturer with the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014 and received the Blackwell Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2017.

Wainwright follows Munther Dahleh, who has served in the position since leading the launch of IDSS in 2015.