Dean Agustín Rayo and the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) have recently welcomed 14 new educators to the MIT community. They bring a wealth of experience and varied expertise in their respective fields of research.
Naoki Egami has joined MIT as an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. Egami focuses on political methodology, creating statistical techniques for inquiries in political science and the social sciences. His current research initiatives target three areas: external validity and generalizability; machine learning and artificial intelligence within social sciences; and causal inference using network and spatial data. His work has been published in numerous academic journals encompassing political science, statistics, and computer science, including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series B), NeurIPS, and Science Advances. Prior to his tenure at MIT, Egami was an assistant professor at Columbia University. He obtained his PhD from Princeton University (2020) and a BA from the University of Tokyo (2015).
Valentin Figueroa has joined the Department of Political Science as an assistant professor. His research investigates historical state formation, ideological transformations, and scientific advancements, particularly focusing on Western Europe and Latin America. His current book project explores the dismantling of patrimonial administrations and the emergence of bureaucratic states during early modern Europe. Before coming to MIT, he served as an assistant professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Hailing from Argentina, Figueroa earned a BA and an MA in political science from Universidad de San Andrés and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, respectively, as well as a PhD in political science from Stanford University.
Bailey Flanigan serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, with a dual appointment in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her research integrates methodologies from diverse fields—including social choice theory, game theory, algorithms, statistics, and survey techniques—to enhance political methodology and improve public engagement in democratic processes. She has a keen interest in sampling algorithms, opinion measurement/preference elicitation, and the creation of democratic innovations like deliberative minipublics and participatory budgeting. Before her arrival at MIT, Flanigan worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University’s Data Science Initiative. She holds a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in bioengineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Rachel Fraser is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. She previously lectured at Oxford University, where she also completed her graduate studies in philosophy. Her interests encompass epistemology, language, feminism, aesthetics, and political philosophy. Currently, she is focused on a book manuscript addressing the epistemology of narrative.
Brian Hedden PhD ’12 is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, holding a shared position in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research delves into the principles of belief formation and decision-making. His work spans epistemology, decision theory, and ethics, including discussions on AI ethics. He authored “Reasons without Persons: Rationality, Identity, and Time” (Oxford University Press, 2015) and has published articles on topics such as collective action challenges, legal standards of proof, algorithmic fairness, and political polarization, among others. Prior to joining MIT, he was a faculty member at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney and held a junior research fellowship at Oxford. He received his BA from Princeton University in 2006 and his PhD from MIT in 2012.
Rebekah Larsen is an assistant professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. A media sociologist with a PhD from Cambridge University, her research uncovers and scrutinizes underexamined media ecosystems, particularly regarding sociotechnical change and power dynamics within these systems. Recent research topics include conservative talk radio stations in rural Utah (with ethnographic studies in conservative contexts); the emerging global network of fact-checkers supported by social media platform content moderation contracts; and the manipulation of search engines impacting journalists and activists surrounding a contentious privacy regulation from the 2010s. Before joining MIT, Larsen held a Marie Curie grant at the University of Copenhagen and was a visiting fellow at the Information Society Project (Yale Law School). She is currently affiliated as a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center (Harvard Law School) and as a research associate at the Center for Governance and Human Rights (Cambridge University).
Pascal Le Boeuf joins the Music and Theater Arts Section as an assistant professor. The The New York Times has characterized him as “sleek, new,” “hyper-fluent,” and “a composer that rocks.” He is a Grammy Award-winning composer, jazz pianist, and producer whose compositions range from improvised music to fusing notation-based chamber music with production technology. Recent collaborations include partnerships with Akropolis Reed Quintet, Christian Euman, Jamie Lidell, Alarm Will Sound, Ji Hye Jung, Tasha Warren, Dave Eggar, Barbora Kolarova and Arx Duo, JACK Quartet, Friction Quartet, Hub New Music, Todd Reynolds, Sara Caswell, Jessica Meyer, Nick Photinos, Ian Chang, Dayna Stephens, Linda May Han Oh, Justin Brown, and Le Boeuf Brothers. He received a 2025 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition, a 2024 Barlow Commission, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2020 Copland House Residency Award. Le Boeuf is a Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellow and a PhD candidate in music composition at Princeton University.
Becca Lewis is an assistant professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. An interdisciplinary scholar examining the rise of right-wing politics in Silicon Valley and online, she holds a PhD in communication theory and research from Stanford University along with an MS in social science from the University of Oxford. Her work has appeared in academic journals such as New Media and Society, Social Media and Society, and American Behavioral Scientist, as well as in news outlets including The Guardian and Business Insider. She has previously worked as a researcher at the Data and Society Research Institute, where she published the organization’s major reports on media manipulation, disinformation, and right-wing digital media. In 2022, she testified as an expert witness in the defamation lawsuit involving Alex Jones brought forth by the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim.
Ben Lindquist serves as an assistant professor in the History Section, with a shared position in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research examines the historical intersections of computing with concepts of religion, emotion, and divergent thinking. His first book, “The Feeling Machine,” which is under contract with the University of Chicago Press, chronicles the history of synthetic speech and its relation to the study of emotion within computer science. Before arriving at MIT, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Science in Human Culture Program at Northwestern University and earned his PhD in history from Princeton University.
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Bar Luzon joins the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy as an assistant professor. Luzon completed her BA in philosophy in 2017 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her PhD in philosophy in 2024 at New York University. Prior to her arrival at MIT, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Rutgers University. Her focus encompasses the philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and epistemology. Her research investigates the essence of representation and the composition of reality. In addressing these topics, she explores mental content, metaphysical determination, the instruments of mental representation, and the relationship between truth and various epistemic concepts.
Mark Rau is an assistant professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section, with a joint position in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He participates in developing graduate programs centered on music technology. His interests lie in musical acoustics, vibration and acoustic measurement, audio signal processing, and physical modeling synthesis, among other domains. As a lifelong musician, his research centers on musical instruments and innovative audio effects. Before joining MIT, he completed a postdoc at McGill University and served as a lecturer at Stanford University. He obtained his PhD at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Additionally, he holds an MA in music, science, and technology from Stanford, along with a BS in physics and BMus in jazz from McGill University.
Viola Schmitt is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. She is a linguist with a keen focus on semantics. Much of her research aims to comprehend general constraints on the meanings of human language; specifically, the principles governing which meanings can be conveyed by human languages and how these languages can encapsulate meaning. Variants of this inquiry were also pivotal to grants she received from the Austrian and German research foundations. She obtained her PhD in linguistics from the University of Vienna and has worked as a postdoc and/or lecturer at the Universities of Vienna, Graz, Göttingen, and at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent role was as a junior professor at the Humboldt University Berlin.
Angela Saini joins the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program as an assistant professor. As a science journalist and author, she produces television and radio documentaries for the BBC, and her writings have appeared in National Geographic, Wired, Science, and Foreign Policy. She has authored four books, collectively translated into 18 languages. Her acclaimed 2019 book, “Superior: The Return of Race Science,” was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, while her latest publication, “The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality,” was a contender for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. She holds an MEng from the University of Oxford and was named an honorary fellow of her alma mater, Keble College, in 2023.
Paris Smaragdis SM ’97, PhD ’01 joins the Music and Theater Arts Section as a professor with a shared appointment in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He earned a BMus (cum laude ’95) from Berklee College of Music. His research occupies the nexus of signal processing and machine learning, particularly related to sound and music. He has served as a research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, a senior research scientist at Adobe Research, and an Amazon Scholar with Amazon’s AWS. He dedicated 15 years as a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, where he led the development of the CS+Music program and acted as an associate director of the School of Computer and Data Science.
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