Provost

Biography

Cynthia Barnhart is MIT’s provost and the Abraham J. Siegel Professor of Management Science and Professor of Operations Research at MIT. She earned her both her master’s degree in 1986 and her PhD in 1988 in transportation systems and optimization at the Institute. Barnhart has a distinguished career at MIT and has served in many leadership roles, including most recently as chancellor from 2014 to 2021. She also served as the associate and acting dean for the School of Engineering.

A member of the Institute’s faculty since 1992 and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Barnhart’s teaching and research has focused on the areas of large-scale optimization and analytics, with applications in transportation and logistics systems. She has supervised the thesis research of scores of students across a range of disciplines and has published widely in the flagship journals of her field.