Rate My Professor Devavrat Shah

Devavrat Shah is the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he has served on the faculty since 2005. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, receiving the President of India Gold Medal as the best graduating student across all engineering disciplines, and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, for which he was awarded the INFORMS George B. Dantzig Best Dissertation Award. Shah is a member of MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and Operations Research Center (ORC). He directs the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC) within IDSS and serves as Faculty Director of the MicroMasters in Statistics and Data Science program. He also holds positions as Visiting Adjunct Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Distinguished Professor at the Mehta School of Data Science and AI, IIT Guwahati, and is co-founder of Ikigai Labs and Celect, Inc., a machine learning startup specializing in demand forecasting for retailers.

Shah's research specializes in the theory of large complex networks, spanning network algorithms, stochastic networks, network information theory, and large-scale statistical inference, with current emphasis on social data processing and practical algorithms for statistical inference. His contributions address designing high-performance, simple algorithms under resource constraints, with applications in wireless access networks, social data processing including ranking, recommendations, and crowdsourcing, and scalable data center operations. His work across electrical engineering, computer science, and operations research has had substantial impact, reflected in over 24,000 Google Scholar citations and an h-index of 67. Shah has earned numerous accolades, including the 2025 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award, 2010 INFORMS Erlang Prize, 2008 ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star Award, NSF CAREER Award, IEEE Infocom Best Paper Award (2004), multiple ACM SIGMETRICS and INFORMS best paper and publication awards, and the 2016 INFORMS MSOM Best Publication Award. He serves as an associate editor for Operations Research.