Ankur Moitra

Ankur Moitra is the Norbert Wiener Professor of Mathematics at MIT and the Director of the Statistics and Data Science Center. He works at the interface between theoretical computer science and machine learning by developing algorithms with provable guarantees and foundations for reasoning about their behavior. His research spans a diverse range of topics, including the method of moments, robust statistics, sampling, tensor methods and quantum learning. He holds a joint appointment in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and is a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Before joining MIT as faculty in 2013, he received his BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University where he was the valedictorian in 2007.  He received his MS and PhD in Computer Science from MIT and won the William A. Martin and George M. Sprowls thesis awards in 2009 and 2011 respectively. He was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching, including a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, an ONR Young Investigator Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a Hertz Fellowship, a School of Science Excellence in Graduate Teaching Prize and a College of Computing Teaching Prize. In addition, he has been heavily involved in summer research programs both at the high school and undergraduate levels that have helped expose students to the joys of independent research.