Chara Podimata
Class of 1942 Career Development Professor
Assistant Professor of Operations Research and Statistics, MIT
Lead Researcher at Archimedes/Athena RC
MIT Sloan School of Management, E62 - 579
podimata[AT]mit[DOT]edu
My Google Scholar Profile
About
I'm a Class of 1942 Career Development Assistant Professor of OR/Stat at MIT and a Lead Researcher at Archimedes/Athena RC. My research interests lie mostly on the intersection of Theoretical Computer Science, Economics and AI and specifically on AI auditing, incentive-aware AI, social computing, online learning, and mechanism design. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about policy questions related to AI and recommendation systems, both from a mathetical and a practical point-of-view.
Funding. My research is supported by an Amazon Research Award (2023), a MacArthur Foundation x-grant, a Google Research Scholar Award (2025), an MIT grant from the GenAI Consortium (MGAIC), and a MITHIC SHASS+ Connectivity Grant (joint with Adam Berinsky and Charles Stewart).
Advising. I'm very lucky to be working with an incredible set of students. You can read about my advising philosophy as a professor in my Advising Statement. The statement was drafted in collaboration with Bailey Flanigan.
Before MIT. Before MIT, I was a FODSI postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. I obtained my PhD in CS, and I was a member of the EconCS group at Harvard, where I was advised by Professor Yiling Chen. During my PhD, my research was generously supported by a Microsoft Dissertation Grant and a Siebel Scholarship. During the summer of 2019 and spring of 2020, I was an intern at Microsoft Research in New York City, mentored by Jennifer Wortman Vaughan and Alex Slivkins respectively. During the summer of 2021, I was an intern at Google in New York City, hosted by Renato Paes Leme. Before joining Harvard, I was an intern for Google in Athens, Greece. I received my Diploma from National Technical University of Athens, where I was advised by Professor Dimitris Fotakis.
Postdoc Position. Asu Ozdaglar and I have a joint postdoc position for next year. More information here!
You can find my CV here [Last update: June 2025].
My birthname is Charikleia Podimata, but I go by Chara. To pronounce my name correctly, just pretend that the "C" is silent, i.e., Hara.