Faculty

Chris Knittel, George P. Shultz Professor and Professor of Applied Economics, has won the 2023-2024 MIT Undergraduate Economics Association (UEA) Professor of the Year Award, citing his “engaging, charismatic, and illustrative style of teaching.” 

One sample nomination included: “Knittel was an amazing professor. The real-life simulations we did in class were the most amazing application of economics in the energy world ... Besides being a great teacher, he went out of his way to interact with students during the class which I had never seen before in a class of that size. I felt comfortable asking questions because of the culture he established.”

Nominations from MIT undergraduates are judged by a UEA committee to recognize one faculty member and teaching assistant each year.

Rama Ramakrishnan, professor of the practice in the Operations Research and Statistics Group, has won a 2024 Teaching with Digital Technology Award from MIT for his innovative use of digital tools in his teaching.

These student-nominated, student-judged awards recognize faculty and instructors who have effectively used digital technology to improve teaching and learning at MIT. This recognition also gives the MIT community the opportunity to learn from their innovative practices.

The awards are co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor. This year students submitted a total of 136 nominations, and six winners were selected.

Mike Whinston, MIT Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and Professor of Applied Economics and of MIT Department of Economics, has won the 2024 Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize from the Toulouse School of Economics in France. This annual prize recognizes “a renowned international economist whose research, in the spirit of the work undertaken by Professor Jean-Jacques Laffont, combines both the theoretical and the empirical.”

Roberto Fernandez, the William F. Pounds Professor of Organization Studies and 
Georgia Perakis, John C Head III Dean (Interim) and professor of Operations Management, Operations Research & Statistics, each received an MIT Sloan Outstanding Teacher Award. Each year, students nominate instructors for several teaching awards and the final recipients are chosen based on the quantity and quality of their nominations.
 

Mohammad Fazel-Zarandi, research scientist and senior lecturer, was named the  MIT Sloan School Teacher of the Year. Each year, students nominate instructors for several teaching awards, and the final recipients are chosen based on the quantity and quality of their nominations.

Tavneet Suri (Louis E. Seley Professor of Applied Economics) received the Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising, established by the MIT Graduate Student Council to recognize faculty demonstrating “unbounded compassion and dedication towards students.”

Wanda Orlikowski has won the 2024 Samuel M. Seegal Faculty Prize. Orlikowski is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Management at MIT Sloan. The Seegal Prize is shared with the MIT School of Engineering and is awarded every other year to a professor “who inspires students in pursuing and achieving excellence.” The award was established by Paula Seegal-Thompson for her father, a member of the class of 1922. The Seegal faculty prize is selected by a review committee at MIT.
 

Renée Richardson Gosline and Scott Stern were each awarded the 2024 Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching, established to honor  educational innovation and excellence. The Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching Award is the most prestigious teaching prize offered by the School.  The award was established in 2006 and is awarded each year to two MIT Sloan faculty members, as well as two electrical engineering and computer science faculty members, for their contributions to educational excellence at MIT.

Gosline is a research scientist and a senior lecturer in marketing; Stern is the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology at MIT Sloan.
 

Anna Stansbury has won a 2024 Early Career Research Award from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. This honor recognizes and supports outstanding scholars who have received their PhD within the last six years, “to carry out policy-relevant research on labor market issues,” furthering the Upjohn Institute’s “mission of informing employment policy and practice with timely research.” Stanbury’s awarded project is entitled “Minimum Wages and Workplace Injuries.”

Jackson Lu, Sloan School Career Development Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies, recently received three honors:

First, Lu is a recipient of the 2024 Association for Psychological Science (APS) Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, recognizing cutting-edge research of “particularly creative and promising APS members who embody the future of the field,” from among scholars of all domains of psychology (e.g., social psychology, personality psychology, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, etc.), making it perhaps the most prestigious early-career award in psychology. The award announcement cites “Lu’s groundbreaking research on the ‘Bamboo Ceiling’ … that East Asians face in the United States” and his studies of “the benefits and drawbacks of multicultural experiences,” as well as noting “Lu’s innovative scientific methods,” concluding: “Lu’s work has advanced multiple areas of exploration, including industrial-organizational, social, cognitive, and educational psychology.”

Second, Lu has won the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues 2023 Louise Kidder Early Career Award, which recognizes “social issues researchers who have made substantial contributions to the field early in their careers” (within 10 years of a graduate degree).

Third, Lu is the winner of the 2023 Future of Work Research Prize from the Center for Leadership in the Future of Work at the University of Zurich. The award announcement includes a short video of his research proposal for his winning project, “The Dark Side of Using Generative AI,” with collaborators Lesley Song (MIT), Dong Liu (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Li Zhu and Jingjing Ma (both at Peking University), and notes: “Dr. Lu’s research, conducted through surveys and a longitudinal field experiment in both China and the US, will shed light on the ethical implications of generative AI and its impact on the future of work.”