SSRC - Key Persons

Principal
Research Scientist
Principal Research Scientist / Director, Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative
Principal Research Scientist in the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Donna H. Rhodes is a principal research scientist in the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the director of the MIT Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative (SEAri), a research group focused on advancing theories, methods, and practices for the engineering of complex sociotechnical systems. She is principal investigator for numerous sponsored research projects on human-model interaction, model curation, model-centric decision making, and innovative approaches for enterprise transformation under the digital paradigm. Her research involves deep collaboration and engagement with government, industry and other academic partners. She is a principal investigator and collaborator in the DoD Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC). She teaches graduate courses, professional courses and custom executive courses, and has advised over 80 graduate students. She has over 150 publications, and is co-author of the book Architecting the Future Enterprise. Prior to joining MIT in 2003, Dr. Rhodes held systems engineering and senior leadership positions at IBM, Lockheed Martin, and Lucent. She is a Past President and Fellow of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). Her contributions in the systems field have been recognized by numerous publication awards, INCOSE Founders Award, IBM Outstanding Innovation Award and Lockheed Martin NOVA Award. She received her M.S and Ph.D. in Systems Science from the T.J. Watson School of Engineering at Binghamton University.

Elizabeth Hoffecker

Job Titles:

Research Scientist, Group Lead

Elizabeth Skrip

Job Titles:

Graphic Illustrator

Eric Rebentisch

Job Titles:

Research Associate

Flora Keumurian

fl..@mit.edu

Job Titles:

Assistant Director

Fotini Christia

Job Titles:

Director
Headquarters Staff Member
Director IDSS / Ford International Professor, Social Sciences
Director of SSRC / Professor of Political Science
Director, IDSS
International Professor of the Social Sciences

Fotini Christia is the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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 program in Social and Engineering Systems (SES) at MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing. Her research had focused on 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 currently 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. She also has a new line of research that examines how to effectively integrate AI tools in public policy. Fotini is the author of "Alliance Formation in Civil War" (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was awarded 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. She is co-editor with Graeme Blair (UCLA) and Jeremy Weinstein (Stanford) of "Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust", forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (2024). Her research has also appeared in Science, Nature Human Behavior, Review of Economic Studies, NeurIPs, Communications Medicine, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, American Political Science Review, and Annual Review of Political Science among other journals. Her opinion pieces have been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe among other outlets. Fotini graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University in 2001 with a joint BA in Economics-Operations Research and an MA in International Affairs. She joined the MIT faculty in July 2008 after receiving her PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University that year.