Munther Dahleh

Munther A. Dahleh is the William A. Coolidge Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and the Director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).

He is also affiliated with MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). Dahleh was previously the associate department head of EECS, and has been a Visiting Professor at the California Institute of Technology in their Department of Electrical Engineering. He has held consulting positions with several companies in the United States and abroad.

Dahleh is internationally known for his fundamental contributions to robust control theory; computational methods for controller design; the interplay between information and control; the fundamental limits of learning and decision in networked systems; and the detection and mitigation of systemic risk in interconnected and networked systems. His particular research interests include networked systems: Foundational theory for the interaction between physical and information networks, Information propagation, distributed decisions, learning network structure from data; social networks: Information cascades in stochastic networks, opinion dynamics, global games in modeling outcomes of crises; systemic risk: The development of a foundational theory for the early detection and control of systemic risk resulting from idiosyncratic disturbance affecting components of a networked system; transportation systems: Dynamic models of congestion under disruptions, dependence of fragility on network topology, cascaded failures, value of side information on performance.

Dahleh received his BS in electrical engineering from Texas A & M University, and his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University.