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.

Selected Publications

• Yao, L., Holohan, N., Arbour, D. & Eckles, D. (2021). Privacy-induced experimentation and private causal inference. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) Workshop on Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP).
• Jahani, E., Fraiberger, S. P., Bailey, M., & Eckles, D. (2023). Long ties, disruptive life events, and economic prosperity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120(28). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2211062120
• Schlessinger, J., Garimella, K., Jakesch, M., & Eckles, D. (2023). Effects of Algorithmic Trend Promotion: Evidence from Coordinated Campaigns in Twitter’s Trending Topics. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 17, 777–786. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v17i1.22187

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.