Fotini Christia

Fotini Christia is a principal investigator at the MIT Jameel Clinic and the Ford International professor of the social sciences at MIT. She is director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC), associate director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and chair of the doctoral programme in social and engineering systems at MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing.

Her research interests include issues of conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world, and she has conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Iran, the Palestinian Territories, Syria and Yemen. She is also working to bridge the social sciences, data science and computation by bringing researchers from these disciplines together to address systemic racism across housing, healthcare, policing and social media.

Fotini authored 'Alliance formation in civil war' (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which received the Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics, the Lepgold Prize for Best Book in International Relations and a Distinguished Book Award from the International Studies Association.

Fotini graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University in 2001 with a joint bachelor's degree in economics and operations research and a master's degree in international affairs. She received a doctorate degree in public policy from Harvard University in 2008 before joining MIT faculty that year.