Dean Eckles

Faculty

Dean Eckles

About

Dean Eckles is the KDD Career Development Professor in Communications and Technology and an Associate Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. He is affiliate faculty at the Institute for Data, Systems & Society.

His substantive research examines people's interactions with and through communication technologies, especially the ways these technologies mediate, amplify, and direct social influence. This work sometimes requires or benefits from new analytical methods, so Eckles also works on applied statistics, design of field experiments, and causal inference.

Prior to joining MIT, he was a scientist at Facebook, where he worked on many product areas and analytical methods, including News Feed, messaging, advertising, tools for randomized experiments, and survey methods. Eckles previously worked in research at Nokia and Yahoo.

Eckles received his BA in philosophy, a BS and MS in cognitive science, an MS in statistics, and a PhD in communication, all from Stanford University.

Honors

Eckles wins Amazon Research Award

Publications

Featured Publication

"Estimating Peer Effects in Networks with Peer Encouragement Designs."

Eckles, Dean, René F. Kizilcec, and Eytan Bakshy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 113, No. 27 (2016): 7316-7322.

Featured Publication

"Bias and High-Dimensional Adjustment in Observational Studies of Peer Effects."

Eckles, Dean and Eytan Bakshy, Working Paper. 2018.

"Interdependence and the Cost of Uncoordinated Responses to COVID-19."

Holtz, David, Michael Zhao, Seth G. Benzell, Cathy Y. Cao, M. Amin Rahimian, Jeremy Yang, Jennifer Allen, Avinash Collis, Alex Moehring, Tara Sowrirajan, Dipayan Ghosh, Yunhao Zhang, Paramveer S. Dhillon, Christos Nicolaides, Dean Eckles, and Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6111-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, May 2020.

"Protecting Elections from Social Media Manipulation."

Aral, Sinan K. and Dean Eckles. Science Vol. 365, No. 6456 (2019): 858-861.

"Bootstrap Thompson Sampling and Sequential Decision Problems in the Behavioral Sciences."

Eckles, Dean, and Maurits Kaptein. Sage Open Vol. 9, No. 2 (2019): 1-12. Download Paper.

"Exact p-values for Network Interference."

Athey, Susan, Dean Eckles, and Guido W. Imbens. Journal of the American Statistical Association Vol. 113, No. 521 (2018): 230-240.

Load More

Recent Insights

Ideas Made to Matter

2019, illustrated

Six illustrations and photos we loved this year.

Dec 2, 2019
Read Article
Press

New MIT paper outlines plan to fight election interference

One of the most urgent threats facing our democracy and other democracies abroad is the ability to detect and thwart foreign election interference. But, research on election interference is scarce.

Aug 29, 2019
Read Article
Load More

Media Highlights