Hamsa Balakrishnan
William E. Leonhard (1940) Professor, Aeronautics and Astronautics; Director, Transportation@MIT
Hamsa is the Associate Dean of Engineering and the William E. Leonhard (1940) Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She leads the Dynamics, Infrastructure Networks, and Mobility (DINaMo) Research Group. Her current research interests are in the design, analysis, and implementation of control and optimization algorithms for large-scale cyber-physical infrastructures, with an emphasis on air transportation systems. These include airport congestion control algorithms, air traffic routing and airspace resource allocation methods, machine learning for weather forecasts and flight delay prediction, and methods to mitigate environmental impacts. Her research spans theory and practice, including both algorithm development and real-world field tests.
She was a recipient of the American Automatic Control Council’s Donald P. Eckman Award in 2014, the AIAA Lawrence Sperry Award in 2012, the inaugural CNA Award for Operational Analysis in 2012, the Kevin Corker Award for Best Paper at the Air Traffic Management R&D Seminar (in 2011, 2021 and 2023), MIT AIAA Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2019, the MIT AIAA Undergraduate Advising Award in 2014, and the NSF CAREER Award in 2008. She is an associate fellow of the AIAA.
At MIT, she is affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS), and the Operations Research Center (ORC).
She is involved in teaching 16.763: Air Transportation Operations Research, 16.781: Airport Systems Planning, Design and Management, and 16.995: Doctoral Research & Communication Seminar. She has also taught 16.002: Unified Engineering Signals & Systems, 16.72: Air Traffic Control, and ESD.55: Management of Infrastructure Systems.
Prior to joining MIT, she was a Principal Development Engineer at the University Affiliated Research Center (UC Santa Cruz) and the NASA Ames Research Center’s Terminal Air Traffic Management Concepts Branch. She received her PhD from Stanford University and her B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
