Game theorist Daskalakis named Avanessians professor at MIT

Game theorist Costis Daskalakis has taken up the inaugural Avenessians professorship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s College of Computing.

He has been at MIT since 2009, and is currently a professor at the university’s Department of Electronical Engineering and Computer Science.

Daskalakis is a theoretical computer scientist who works at the interface of game theory, economics, probability theory, statistics and machine learning. 

He is a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and is affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and the Operations Research Center.

Daskalakis’s work has focused on resolving long-standing open problems about the computational complexity of the Nash equilibrium, the mathematical structure and the computation complexity of multi-item auctions.

He has previously received such honors as the 2018 Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union, the 2018 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Kalai Game Theory and Computer Science Prize from the Game Theory Society, and the 2008 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Earlier this month, MIT’s Sloan School of Management made a slew of new hires, including three new associate professors of finance.

Tong Liu, Lira Mota and Kerry Siani joined the business school from, respectively, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University and Columbia Business School.