Faculty

Manish Raghavan, Drew Houston (2005) Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Information Technology, has been named an AI2050 Early Career Fellow by Schmidt Sciences. These fellowships are “to encourage postdoctoral and pre-tenure researchers from around the world to pursue bold and ambitious work on hard problems in AI, which often is multidisciplinary and typically hard to fund.”

The Fellows were announced in October.  Raghavan’s AI2050 project, which aims to help “ensure that AI strengthens rather than undermines society’s collective intelligence,” is described here.

Joe Moran (Class of 1958 Career Development Assistant Professor of Accounting) has won the 2026 Management Accounting Dissertation Award from the Management Accounting Section of the American Accounting Association (AAA).

Moran’s winning dissertation is titled “Drilldown Data Access Rates and Managerial Target Achievement” (2025, University of Pennsylvania).

The award was presented in August at the 2026 AAA Global Connect (formerly Annual Meeting) in Las Vegas.

Emilio Castilla (NTU Professor of Management and Professor of Work and Organization Studies) has received two honors for his book, "The Meritocracy Paradox: Where Talent Management Strategies Go Wrong and How to Fix Them” (2025, Columbia University Press).

First, Castilla won the 2026 George R. Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management (AOM). This annual award recognizes “the book judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to the global advancement of management knowledge”—in management theory, conceptualization, research, or practice—during the last two years.

Award committee member comments include noting the book’s “synthesis … of two decades of original mixed-methods research … that advances theory, conceptualization, research, and practice within one volume, which is rare”; its interdisciplinary distinction, with “extensive references to sociology, psychology, organizational behavior, and economics”; “it not only provides a solid research grounding but also recommendations for implementation and therefore not only advances the understanding of management but also has the potential for having a real impact on managerial practice”; “scholarly yet practical in equal parts and highly relevant to business and society.”

The award was presented in August in Philadelphia during the 2026 Annual Meeting of the AOM. A 2025 Q&A with Castilla also has more information about the book.

This book was also a Gold Winner in the Business & Leadership (Large Publisher/Large Hybrid) category of the 2026 Nautilus Book Awards, which celebrate “Better Books for a Better World.” For more than 25 years, the Nautilus Book Awards have been recognizing works that contribute to social change, social justice, conscious leadership, and the creation of a better world.
 

Jackson Lu, General Motors Professor of Management and Professor of Work and Organization Studies, has recently won multiple awards for his research. 

First, Lu received the inaugural CARMA (Consortium for the Advancement of Research Methods & Analysis) Credible Management Research Award, which recognizes “rigorous and credible scientific work in the management and organizational sciences,” from among empirical papers published in the prior two calendar years. His winning paper, “Breaking Ceilings: Debate Training Promotes Leadership Emergence by Increasing Assertiveness” (published last year in Journal of Applied Psychology, 110(9), 1225-1239), is co-authored with Michelle X. Zhao (Washington University in St. Louis), Hui Liao (University of Maryland), and Lu Doris Zhang (MIT Sloan PhD student). The comments about the paper include that the authors make "meaningful contributions to both theory (leader emergence) and practice (debate training and assertiveness) … The reporting … could easily serve as an aspirational goal for researchers who promote open science practices.” 

Second, this paper was also a runner-up for the 2026 Best Published Paper Award from the Academy of Management Careers Division. This award honors outstanding research in the field of careers studies that “significantly contributes to advancing careers research by introducing innovative ideas, challenging established theories, and/or employing novel data or methodologies.” 

Third, Lu's working paper titled “How and When National Diversity Stimulates Entrepreneurial Entry: Evidence from Two Large-Scale, Time-Lagged Quasi-Experiments” was a finalist for the 2026 Best Faculty-Led Paper Award in Entrepreneurial Cognition from the AOM Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division.  

These honors were announced at the AOM 2026 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia in July and August.

Catherine Tucker (Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and Professor of Marketing) has won the Donald G. Morrison Long-Term Impact Award from the INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Society for Marketing Science (ISMS). This award is given annually to a marketing paper published in an INFORMS journal “that is viewed to have made a significant long-run impact on the field of Marketing.”

Tucker’s winning 2019 paper, co-authored with Anja Lambrecht (London Business School), is titled “Algorithmic Bias? An Empirical Study of Apparent Gender-Based Discrimination in the Display of STEM Career Ads” (Management Science 65(7):2966-2981).

Stuart Madnick, the John Norris Maguire (1960) Professor of Information Technology, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the 2026 Chief Data Officer and Information Quality (CDOIQ) Symposium. The citation honors Madnick’s “visionary leadership, pioneering contribution, and lifelong dedication to advancing information quality, data management, and the global data leadership community.”

The award was presented in July 2026 at the 20th Annual CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Mass. A post from Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS, where Madnick is founding director) has more information and photos from the event.

Mary Rowe (adjunct professor of Work and Organization Studies and former MIT organizational ombuds for over four decades) has won the 2026 Trailblazer Award from the International Ombuds Association (IOA). This award is the IOA’s highest honor, recognizing significant contributions to the organizational ombuds field over an extended period of time. Rowe was recognized “for her work as a pioneer and one of the most influential ombuds in the profession.”

The award was announced and presented in April at the 2026 IOA Annual Conference. The announcement has more information on Rowe’s “pioneering contributions,” including authoring “MIT’s widely adopted Guide to Dealing with Harassment.” The IOA president commented on her “tremendous impact”: “She has revolutionized how ombuds manage and respond to the politics and problems that arise on campuses, and her lifelong contributions to the profession and IOA are unmatched.” 

Additional information is in this MIT article.

Ziv Epstein (postdoctoral associate; MIT Media Arts and Sciences PhD ’23), Jackson G. Lu (General Motors Professor of Management and professor of Work and Organization Studies), David G. Rand (visiting professor of Marketing; Cornell University), and Michael Stagnaro (research scientist) have won the 2026 Best Publication Award for Innovation in Behavioral Policy from the Behavioral Science & Policy Association (BSPA).

This year’s award recognizes research published 2022-2025 “that advances the rigorous application and development of behavioral/social science to policy and practice in public, private and nonprofit sectors … to encourage work that has potential to improve the quality of life of individuals and/or organizations.”

Their winning paper, titled “Understanding and Combatting Misinformation Across 16 Countries on Six Continents” (Nature Human Behaviour 7, 1502-1513, 2023), is co-authored with Antonio Arechar (CIDE—Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, Mexico), Jennifer Allen (New York University Stern; MIT Sloan Marketing PhD ’24), Adam Berinsky (MIT Political Science), Rocky Cole (iVerify), Kiran Garimella (Rutgers), Andrew Gully (Microsoft), Gordon Pennycook (Cornell University), Robert M. Ross (Macquarie University), and Yunhao (Jerry) Zhang (Psychology of Technology Institute; MIT Sloan PhD ’23).

The paper focuses on misinformation about COVID-19, with nearly 35,000 participants in global experiments that validate major findings from previous work focused on the U.S. factors that predict susceptibility to misinformation, as well as effectiveness of interventions to help, are found to be similar across the world. A Cornell news article has more information.

The award was announced Cambridge at the BSPA 2026 Conference in June.

Kerry Siani (Class of 1958 Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Finance) has won the award for 2026 Best Empirical Finance Paper (the Wharton School – WRDS [Wharton Research Data Services] Award) from the Western Finance Association (WFA).

Siani’s winning working paper, co-authored with Julia Selgrad (the University of Chicago Booth School of Business), is titled “Monetary Policy and Investment Plans.”

The award was presented in June in Denver at the 2026 WFA meeting.

Taha Choukhmane (Albert F. (1942) & Jeanne P. Clear Career Development Assistant Professor in Global Management and Assistant Professor of Finance), Weidong (Weldon) Lin (MIT Sloan Finance PhD student), and Matthew Akuzawa (MIT Sloan Finance predoctoral researcher) have won the 2026 Outstanding Paper Award from the Swiss Finance Institute (SFI). This award recognizes an unpublished research paper that is expected to make an outstanding contribution to the field of finance.

Their winning paper, co-authored with Tim DeSilva (Stanford; MIT Sloan Finance PhD ‘24), is titled “AI Financial Advice: Supply, Demand, and Life Cycle Implications.” A press release about the paper’s research was posted recently.

The award was announced in June, noting that their paper shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) "can improve financial decision-making by providing scalable, low-cost advice, although differences in user characteristics and prompts can lead to unequal wealth outcomes." The paper’s key findings will be presented in June 2027 at the SFI Research Days in Gerzensee, Switzerland.