Cynthia Barnhart

Cynthia Barnhart is a Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering at MIT and a professor in operations research at MIT Sloan School of Management. She previously served as associate and acting dean of the school of engineering and co-directed both the Operations Research Centre and the Centre for Transportation and Logistics. Barnhart was chancellor of MIT from 2014 until 2021.

Her teaching and research centres on large-scale optimisation and analytics, with a focus on applications in transportation and logistics systems. She has supervised graduate and undergraduate theses across a range of disciplines, and has published widely in the flagship journals of her field.

Cynthia took a masters in transportation in 1985 and a PhD in 1988, both from MIT. She is an INFORMS Fellow and elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, she has received honorary doctorates from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2014) and the University of Toronto (2016).