Dean Eckles

Dean Eckles is the Mitsubishi Career Development Professor and Associate Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management with an appointment in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society. His research examines the use of communication technologies to mediate, amplify, and direct social influence. He also develops new analytical methods to further this work, with a focus on causal inference, field experiments and applied statistics. Before 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. Previously he was a researcher at Nokia and Yahoo. He earned a BA in philosophy, a BS and MS in cognitive science, an MS in statistics, and a PhD in communication, all from Stanford University.

Publications

• Holtz, D., Zhao, M., Benzell, S. G., Cao, C., Rahimian, M. A., Yang, J., Allen, J., Collis, A., Moehring, A., Sowrirajan, T., Ghosh, D., Zhang, Y., Dhillon, P., Nicolaides, C., Eckles, D., Aral, S. (2020). Interdependence and the cost of uncoordinated responses to COVID-19. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (33), 19837-19843.
• Eckles, D. and Bakshy, E. (2020). Bias and high-dimensional adjustment in observational studies of peer effects. Journal of the American Statistical Association.
• Garimella, K., & Eckles, D. (2020). Images and misinformation in political groups: Evidence from WhatsApp in India. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review.
• Aral, S.,^* & Eckles, D.^* (2019). Protecting elections from social media manipulation. Science.

Media

• August 4, 2020: MIT Sloan News, The cost of uncoordinated responses to COVID-19.
• August 29, 2019: MIT Sloan News, A 4-step plan for fighting social media manipulation in elections.
• December 12, 2018: MIT Sloan News, What an MIT Sloan professor learned analyzing 1.5 million Facebook gifts.