Dan Braha is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and a faculty member at the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI). He was a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a research scientist at Boston University.

Dan Braha has advanced the formal approach in Engineering Design by introducing methodologies for understanding and improving the design, implementation, and dynamics of Complex Socio-Engineered Systems (CES) as well as exploring the interplay between natural and large-scale human-made systems. One advantage of such an approach is to put natural and complex socio-engineered systems within the same discipline, whereby the study of natural complex systems leads to better methods for engineered complex systems, while experience with building, controlling, and manipulating engineered complex systems enhances understanding of how natural complex systems function.

His research in Complex Socio-Engineered Systems (CES) mainly focuses on understanding their functionality, dynamics, robustness, and fragility. In particular, the following themes are emphasized:

• The description and analysis of CES as networks. Tasks, teams, technical decisions are the nodes. Links quantify the information transfer between the various nodes. The similarity and differences between CES networks and other networks (e.g., Internet, metabolic, and regulatory networks) are of great interest.

• The description of CES dynamics through its decomposition into an interrelated set of localized subsystems.

• The creation of taxonomy of interconnectedness and near-decomposability across different domains and scales in the context of technical systems.