Chara Podimata

About

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I'm a Class of 1942 Career Development Assistant Professor of OR/Stat at MIT and a Lead Researcher at Archimedes/Athena RC. My research interests lie mostly on the intersection of Theoretical Computer Science, Economics and AI and specifically on AI auditing, incentive-aware AI, social computing, online learning, and mechanism design. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about policy questions related to AI and recommendation systems, both from a mathetical and a practical point-of-view.

Funding. My research is supported by an Amazon Research Award (2023), a MacArthur Foundation x-grant, a Google Research Scholar Award (2025), and an MIT grant from the GenAI Consortium (MGAIC).

Advising. I'm very lucky to be working with an incredible set of students. You can read about my advising philosophy as a professor in my Advising Statement. The statement was drafted in collaboration with Bailey Flanigan.

Before MIT. Before MIT, I was a FODSI postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. I obtained my PhD in CS, and I was a member of the EconCS group at Harvard, where I was advised by Professor Yiling Chen. During my PhD, my research was generously supported by a Microsoft Dissertation Grant and a Siebel Scholarship. During the summer of 2019 and spring of 2020, I was an intern at Microsoft Research in New York City, mentored by Jennifer Wortman Vaughan and Alex Slivkins respectively. During the summer of 2021, I was an intern at Google in New York City, hosted by Renato Paes Leme. Before joining Harvard, I was an intern for Google in Athens, Greece. I received my Diploma from National Technical University of Athens, where I was advised by Professor Dimitris Fotakis.

You can find my CV here [Last update: June 2025].

My birthname is Charikleia Podimata, but I go by Chara. To pronounce my name correctly, just pretend that the "C" is silent, i.e., Hara.