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Ankur Moitra is the Director of the Statistics and Data Science Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2007 and then completed his Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at MIT in 2009 and 2011, respectively, under the supervision of Tom Leighton, and was supported by the Fannie E. John Hertz Foundation Fellowship. Moitra has been recognized with the George M. Sprowls Award for best thesis and the William Martin Award for best doctoral and master's dissertations. He spent several years as an NSF CI Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and held a senior postdoctoral position in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. In 2013, he returned to MIT as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and is a principal investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research interests include statistical inference, optimization, approximation codes, and combinatorics, with a particular focus on algorithmic problems and their applications in machine learning and big data.