Faculty

Haoxiang Zhu has won the 2017 Amundi Smith Breeden Prize (First Prize) for the best paper in any area other than corporate finance in The Journal of Finance, which is the official publication of The American Finance Association. Zhu’s winning paper, co-authored with Darrell Duffie (Stanford) and Piotr Dworczak (University of Chicago), is entitled, “Benchmarks in Search Markets” (The Journal of Finance, 72(5):1983-2044). The award was presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association in Philadelphia.

John Sterman has been elected as a Fellow of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). AAAS Fellows are elected by their peers in recognition of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science. Sterman in particular was recognized for his “distinguished contributions to improving decision-making in complex systems, including corporate strategy and operations, energy policy, public health, environmental sustainability, and climate change.” The 2017 AAAS Fellows were formally announced recently in the AAAS News and Notes section of Science and will be honored at a ceremony in February 2018 at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.

Jónas Oddur Jónasson has been awarded a Grand Challenges Explorations Grant in Innovations for Integrated Diagnostics Systems from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Grand Challenges is “a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems.” The challenge initiatives invite proposals twice a year and fosters collaboration and a growing network of research and funding partnerships for global impact. Jónasson’s proposal for Utawaleza - Rainbow Transport includes developing an algorithm using the daily numbers and locations of clinical samples needing transport between health centers and diagnostic laboratories to design optimal courier routes in low-resource settings, to lower costs and maximize the positive public health impact. He and his collaborators will test their system in Malawi, Africa. The grant award was announced on the Grand Challenges website.

Emilio J. Castilla has received the 2017 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the most outstanding MIT Sloan Management Review article on planned change and organizational development published in the period from fall 2015 through summer 2016. Castilla’s winning paper is entitled “Achieving Meritocracy in the Workplace.” The prize was established in 1984 by MIT Sloan faculty in honor of Professor Richard Beckhard, a faculty member for over two decades, who was a founder and an architect of the field of organizational development. The MIT Sloan judges thought Castilla’s article was “well aligned with the thinking of Richard Beckhard, who knew that organizational change was often more complicated than it seemed … Castilla’s call for continuous monitoring and evaluation of the outcomes is very much in line with what Dick would have recommended.” The award was announced in an MIT Sloan Management Review blog post and in the fall 2017 issue.

S.P. Kothari was designated as a 2017 Presidential Scholar by the president of the American Accounting Association (AAA). Kothari delivered a commissioned Presidential Research Lecture as a plenary speaker at the AAA’s 2017 annual meeting in San Diego. The Board of Directors of the AAA has requested that The Accounting Review publish his talk, which was entitled "The Governance Role of Accounting Information: Challenges Facing Users, Producers, and Standard Setters,” as part of the Presidential Research Lecture series.

John Sterman has received the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS) Conference People’s Choice Award for high-impact work at the 9th Annual ARCS Research conference held in June at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. This award is based on a vote of conference attendees for the best paper at the conference. Sterman’s winning paper, co-authored with Juliette Rooney-Varga (UMass Lowell), Eduardo Fracassi (Instituto Tecnologico de Buenos Aires), Travis Franck (Climate Interactive), Florian Kapmeier (ESB Business School, Reutlingen University, Germany), Victoria Kurker (UMass Lowell), Ellie Johnston (Climate Interactive), Andrew Jones (Climate Interactive), and Kenneth Rath (SageFox Consulting Group), is entitled “Can role-play with interactive models enhance climate knowledge, affect and intent to act?”

Adrien Verdelhan has received the 2017 AQR Insight Award First Prize, sponsored by AQR Capital Management. This award recognizes exceptional unpublished academic papers that provide the most significant original approaches to investment issues, offering practical insights for taxable investor or tax-exempt institutional portfolios. The winners are invited to present their new research at AQR. Verdelhan’s winning paper, co-authored with Wenxin Du (Federal Reserve Board) and Alexander Tepper (Columbia University), is entitled "Deviations from Covered Interest Rate Parity.”

Simon Johnson and Sinan Aral were each awarded the 2017 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.

S.P. Kothari has been recognized with an honorary doctorate from the University of Cyprus, which notes his “rich scientific and intellectual work” and his collaboration with their Faculty of Economics and Management.

John Hauser has been recognized with an honorary doctorate from the Erasmus School of Economics at Erasmus University. Hauser was recognized in the laudatio as “one of the main founders of marketing science as a discipline.”  Hauser was also cited as one of the “most rigorous scholars in the field.” The degree was conferred in Rotterdam on November 8, 2016.