Hamsa Balakrishnan

Biography

Hamsa Balakrishnan is an Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research is in the design, analysis, and implementation of control and optimization algorithms for large-scale cyber-physical infrastructures, with an emphasis on air transportation systems. Her contributions include airport congestion control algorithms, air traffic routing and airspace resource allocation methods, machine learning for weather forecasts and flight delay prediction, and methods to mitigate environmental impacts. Her work spans theory and practice, including both algorithm development and real-world field tests.

Before joining MIT, she was at the NASA Ames Research Center, after receiving a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. She received an NSF CAREER Award (2008), the Kevin Corker Award for Best Paper at the FAA/Eurocontrol Air Traffic Management R&D Seminar (2011), the Lawrence Sperry Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2012), the inaugural CNA Award for Operational Analysis (2012), and the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council (2014). She is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA.