Prof. Hamsa Balakrishnan's Journey From IIT Madras to Stanford to NASA and to Associate Dean at MIT
Prof. Hamsa Balakrishnan this summer was appointed Associate Dean of the School of Engineering at MIT, where she focuses on efforts to attract, retain, and support top talent across all academic levels in the School of Engineering.
“I stumbled on a choice of career that I love, so I think even with the benefit of hindsight, I would have picked this one,” says Prof. Balakrishnan, the William E. Leonhard (1940) Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT.
On Nov. 15, 2024, Prof. Balakrishnan will be honored with the “Academia and Innovation Award” for 2024 at the New England Choice Awards Gala at the Burlington Marriott Hotel in Burlington, MA. The event will be attended by over 400 business and community leaders, academics, philanthropists and medical and technology professionals.
As associate dean, Prof. Balakrishnan will help lead and shape various faculty-focused programs and will help manage many of the school’s student-facing programs and initiatives at MIT. She will also support both faculty and students across the School of Engineering with regards to fellowships, awards, and honors. Additionally, she will support and contribute to several key groups within the school.
Before joining MIT, she was at the NASA Ames Research Center, after receiving her PhD from Stanford University and a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
Her research is in the design, analysis, and implementation of control and optimization algorithms for cyber-physical infrastructures, with an emphasis on air transportation. Her contributions include airport congestion control algorithms, air traffic routing and airspace resource allocation methods, machine learning for weather forecasts and flight delay prediction, algorithms for autonomous and advanced air mobility operations, and methods to mitigate the environmental impacts of air transportation.
Prof. Balakrishnan is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award (2008), the CNA Award for Operational Analysis (2012), the AIAA Lawrence Sperry Award (2012), the American Automatic Control Council’s Donald P. Eckman Award (2014), the MIT AIAA Undergrad Advising (2014) and Undergraduate Teaching (2019) Awards, the MIT Office of Graduate Education Committed to Caring Honor (2023), and several best paper awards including the Kevin Corker Award for Best Paper at the FAA and Eurocontrol co-organized USA/Europe Air Traffic Management R&D Seminar (2011, 2021 and 2023).