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 Machine Learning and specifically on incentive-aware machine learning, social computing, online learning, and mechanism design. Recently, I have started thinking about policy questions related to AI and recommendation systems.

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.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.