Rahwan was born in Aleppo, Syria. He earned an Information Systems PhD in 2005 from the University of Melbourne. As an assistant and then associate professor in Computing and Information Science at MIT-partnered Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, Rahwan investigated scalable social mobilization's possibilities, limits, and challenges in various contexts by analyzing data from the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge,[4][5] the DARPA Shredder Challenge 2011,[6][7] and the 2012 US State Department Tag Challenge.[8][9][10] In 2015, Rahwan started the Scalable Cooperation Group at the MIT Media Lab, where he is the AT&T Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences,[11] as well as an affiliate faculty at the MIT Institute of Data, Systems and Society.[12] Since 2019 Rahwan is a director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he founded and directs the Center for Humans and Machines.[13]