Navid Azizan

Navid Azizan will join the MIT faculty with dual appointments in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) as an assistant professor in September. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. He received his PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2020, his MSc from the University of Southern California in 2015, and his BSc from Sharif University of Technology in 2013. Additionally, he was a research intern at Google DeepMind in 2019. Azizan’s research interests broadly lie in machine learning, control theory, mathematical optimization, and network science. He has made fundamental contributions to various aspects of intelligent systems, including the design and analysis of optimization algorithms for nonconvex and networked problems with applications to the smart grid, distributed computation, epidemics, and autonomy. Azizan’s work has been recognized by several awards including the 2020 Information Theory and Applications (ITA) Graduation-Day Gold Award. He was named an Amazon Fellow in Artificial Intelligence in 2017 and a PIMCO Fellow in Data Science in 2018. His research on electricity markets received the ACM GREENMETRICS Best Student Paper Award in 2016. He was also the first-place winner and a gold medalist at the 2008 National Physics Olympiad in Iran. He co-organizes the popular “Control meets Learning” virtual seminar series.