Hamsa Balakrishnan is the William E. Leonhard (1940) Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before joining MIT, she was at the NASA Ames Research Center, after receiving her PhD from Stanford University and a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Her research is in the design, analysis, and implementation of control and optimization algorithms for large-scale cyber-physical infrastructures, with an emphasis on air transportation systems. Her contributions include airport congestion control algorithms, air traffic routing and airspace resource allocation methods, machine learning for weather forecasts and flight delay prediction, and methods to mitigate environmental impacts.

She was a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2008, the inaugural CNA Award for Operational Analysis in 2012, the AIAA Lawrence Sperry Award in 2012, the American Automatic Control Council's Donald P. Eckman Award in 2014, and several best paper awards.