Sendhil Mullainathan

Senior Advisor

Sendhil is Professor of Economics and Peter de Florez Professor of EECS (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science) at MIT. His current research uses machine learning to understand complex problems in human behavior, social policy, and especially medicine, where computational techniques have the potential to uncover biomedical insights from large-scale health data. Sendhil is cofounder of Nightingale, the computational medicine initiative, Pique, an app that changes how people read books and learn, and Dandelion, a company that catalyzes AI in healthcare.

In past work he has combined insights from economics and behavioral science with causal inference tools—lab, field, and natural experiments—to study social problems such as discrimination and poverty. Papers include: the impact of poverty on mental bandwidth; how algorithms can improve on judicial decision-making; whether CEO pay is excessive; using fictitious resumes to measure discrimination; showing that higher cigarette taxes make smokers happier; and modeling how competition affects media bias.

Sendhil enjoys writing. He recently co-authored Scarcity: Why Having too Little Means so Much and writes regularly for the New York Times. Additionally, his research has appeared in a variety of publications including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Social Cognition, British Medical Journal, and Management Science.

Sendhil helped co-found a non-profit to apply behavioral science (ideas42), co-founded a center to promote the use of randomized control trials in development (the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab), serves on the board of the MacArthur Foundation, has worked in government in various roles, is affiliated with the NBER and BREAD, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Prior to joining MIT, Sendhil was the Roman Family University Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at University of Chicago Booth and the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where he taught courses about machine learning and big data.

Sendhil is a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” has been designated a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, was labeled a “Top 100 Thinker” by Foreign Policy Magazine, and was named to the “Smart List: 50 people who will change the world” by Wired Magazine (UK). His hobbies include basketball, board games, googling, and fixing up classic espresso machines.