Teaching

Research opportunities

I am always happy to hear from MIT students, including undergraduate and graduate students, who want to contribute to research on social networks, applied graph theory, social media, and causal inference.

Teaching at MIT

Research design: Decision-theoretic perspectives

Fall 2025. 15.838. T 9-12.
Doctoral seminar on designing empirical research, with a focus on multiple ways decision theory is relevant to design and analysis of experimental and non-experimental studies. The course pairs methodological topics with relevant empirical studies. Draft syllabus.

Marketing and product analytics

Spring 2026. 15.819. TTh 1-2:30 or 2:30-4pm.
More information is here.

Designing for behavior change

Not offered in AY 2025-2026. Spring (second half) 2025. 15.S14.
Many products and services aim to change the behaviors of the people who use them, and people often adopt these with the explicit goal of changing their own behaviors in domains like health, personal finance, sustainability, and relationships. This course combines ideas from design thinking and process with behavioral science, especially using the latter generatively in the design process. Through intensive teamwork in and outside of classes, students will do design research, idea generation, and rapid prototyping of products to change specific behaviors.

Design and analysis of experiments

Fall 2023. 15.838.
Doctoral seminar with a combination of (a) methodological readings and lectures on experimental design and randomization inference and policy learning, especially for field experiments, and (b) critical readings of important work using randomized experiments. Syllabus.

Topics in research design

Spring 2022. 15.838.
Doctoral seminar on designing empirical research, with a focus on causal inference. The course pairs methodological topics with relevant empirical studies. Topics include regression discontinuity designs, partial identification, and sensitivity analysis. Syllabus.

Free online courses

Exploratory data analysis with R

Massive open online course (MOOC) on Udacity. With Moira Burke, Chris Saden, and Solomon Messing. Enroll for free here.

Previous teaching at Stanford University

Communication 114S. Persuasion, Contagion, and Compliance-Gaining in Online Media

Summer 2011. Syllabus.