MIT professor Navid Azizan has received a 2025 Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising, an Institute Award presented by the Graduate Student Council. Azizan is the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and a core faculty member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).
The Frank E. Perkins Award is presented to a faculty member from each school (Architecture and Planning, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Engineering, Sloan School of Management, Science, and Health Sciences and Technology) who, as a graduate student advisor, demonstrates unbounded compassion and dedication towards students. This award is named in the honor of Frank E. Perkins, Dean of the Graduate School from 1983-1995.
Azizan is a Principal Investigator in the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS) and a faculty member of the MIT Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC), the Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE), and the Operations Research Center (ORC).
His research interests broadly lie in machine learning, systems and control, mathematical optimization, and network science. His research lab focuses on various aspects of enabling large-scale intelligent systems, with an emphasis on principled learning and optimization algorithms, with applications in autonomous systems and societal networks. He obtained his PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2020, his MSc in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 2015, and his BSc in electrical engineering with a minor in physics from Sharif University of Technology in 2013. Prior to joining MIT, he completed a postdoc in the Autonomous Systems Laboratory (ASL) at Stanford University in 2021. Additionally, he was a research scientist intern at Google DeepMind in 2019.
His work has been recognized by several awards, including Research Awards from Google, Amazon, and MathWorks, the 2020 Information Theory and Applications (ITA) Gold Graduation Award, and the 2016 ACM GREENMETRICS Best Student Paper Award. He was named to the list of Outstanding Academic Leaders in Data from the CDO Magazine in 2024 and 2023, named an Amazon Fellow in Artificial Intelligence in 2017, and a PIMCO Fellow in Data Science in 2018. He was also the first-place winner and a gold medalist at the 2008 National Physics Olympiad in Iran.
