Negin (Nikki) Golrezaei

Negin Golrezaei, Theresa Seley Associate Professor in Management Science and Associate Professor of Operations Management, has received two honors:

First, Golrezaei won the 2025 Best Operations Management Paper in Operations Research Award from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society. This biennial award recognizes “the most significant contribution to the theory and practice of operations management” published in the journal in the preceding four years.

Golrezaei’s winning paper, “Learning Product Rankings Robust to Fake Users” (Operations Research 71(4):1171-1196, 2022), was co-authored with Vahideh Manshadi (Yale University), Jon Schneider (Google Research New York), and Shreyas Sekar (University of Toronto Scarborough). The paper addresses a growing challenge in digital platforms: how to learn product rankings when the platform is manipulated by fake users — such as those generated by click farms.

The award was presented in June at the 2025 INFORMS MSOM Conference in London.

Second, Golrezaei was selected for the Poets & Quants 2025 Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors list.

Negin Golrezaei, W. Maurice Young (1961) Career Development Associate Professor of Management and Associate Professor of Operations Management, has won a Distinguished Paper Award recognizing three of the best papers presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2024. 

Golrezaei’s winning paper, “Online Combinatorial Optimization with Group Fairness Constraints” (Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence), was co-authored with Rad Niazadeh (Chicago Booth School of Business), Kumar Kshitij Patel (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago), and Fransisca Susan (Two Sigma; 2023 MIT PhD in Operations Research).

Negin Golrezaei, Associate Professor of Operations Management, has won the 2023 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Minority Issues Forum (MIF) Paper Competition Award, which recognizes outstanding recent contributions of MIF members in the field of operations research, management science, or information systems.

Golrezaei’s winning paper, co-authored with Vahideh Manshadi (Yale), Jon Schneider (Google Research), and Shreyas Sekar (University of Toronto), is entitled “Learning Product Rankings Robust to Fake Users” (Operations Research, 71(4): 1171-1196, 2023).

Negin (Nicky) Golrezaei is the recipient of a 2021 Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Known as one of the oldest and most selective U.S. science and technology basic-research programs, the ONR YIP funds early-career academic researchers (investigators) “whose scientific pursuits show outstanding promise for supporting the Department of Defense, while also promoting their professional development.”

Following an extremely competitive selection process, the awards were announced recently. Golrezaei is one of three MIT awardees among the 38 scientists chosen from a broad spectrum of naval-relevant technical fields across science and engineering, “who show exceptional promise for doing creative research,” with “prior academic achievement and potential for significant scientific breakthrough” being key criteria.

Golrezaei’s three-year project, entitled “Finding a Needle in a Haystack:  Utilizing Structures and Predictive Information in Online Optimization,” will focus on designing powerful and fast-learning online learning algorithms that optimally take advantage of the structures and predictive information regarding the underlying time-varying combinatorial environments where decision-makers have a great deal of uncertainty about those environments. Her fast-learning algorithms will better equip decision-makers who face an exponentially large number of actions from which to choose, and the algorithms can be applied to a wide range of problems in support of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.

Negin Golrezaei has won a 2018 Google Faculty Research Award in Algorithms and Optimization. These awards facilitate interaction between Google and academia (both faculty and graduate students) and support cutting-edge technical academic research (in computer science, engineering, and related fields), for projects whose output will be made available to the research community. The winners were chosen from among over 900 proposals received from 40 countries and over 320 universities. Golrezaei’s award will fund a graduate student for one year to work on her research project entitled, "Pricing and Bidding in Supply Chain of Auctions.”