Faculty

Sinan Aral has won the 2018 Fellows Choice Award (Academic division), an Excellence in New Communications Award from the Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board (SNCR). These awards honor the work of innovative organizations and individuals “who are advancing the use of digital and social media, mobile media, collaborative technologies, virtual reality, and other emerging digital technologies to improve business, media, health, law, culture, and society.” Fellows Choice Award winners were chosen by SNCR Fellows this year for their “exemplary effort to address fake news.” Aral’s winning paper, co-authored with Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy (both at the MIT Media Lab in the Laboratory for Social Machines), is entitled “The Spread of True and False News Online.” NCR, a research and education institution dedicated to the advanced study of how new and emerging communications tools and technologies are affecting business, media, health, law, culture, and society, is part of The Conference Board, a global, independent business membership and research association working to provide the world’s leading organizations with the practical knowledge needed to improve performance and better serve society.

Arnoldo Hax has received the Ramon Salas Edwards Award from the Chilean Institute of Engineers in recognition of his book, The Delta Model. This award is given once every three years for the most outstanding scientific or technological research contribution related to the engineering field.

Dimitris Bertsimas and a team he led with MIT students and researchers from Janssen Research & Development, who developed the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, has received the 2021 Innovative Applications in Analytics Award (First Place) from INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). The award, sponsored by the Analytics Society of INFORMS, Kinaxis, and Adelphi University, recognizes the creative and unique application of a combination of analytical techniques in a new area.

In their winning application, entitled “Data-driven COVID-19 Vaccine Development for Janssen,” Bertsimas’s team guided Johnson & Johnson on where to perform the clinical trials for its COVID-19 vaccine. The team also included Michael Lingzhi Li (MIT PhD student advised by Bertsimas) and Omar Skali Lami (MIT PhD student advised by both Bertsimas and Georgia Perakis); Hamza Tazi Bouardi (BCG GAMMA; MIT MBAn ’20, formerly advised by Bertsimas); Ali Haddad-Sisakht (Dynamic Ideas, LLC); and Najat Khan, Jennings Xu, Jose Zamalloa, Amir Hashemi, Ankit Lodha, Yuqi Shang, Kris Standish, Shi-hua Yu, Levon Demirdjian, Xiaoying Wu, and Sid Jain (all from Janssen Pharmaceuticals).

The award was announced at the Virtual 2021 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference. More details can be found in this MIT News article.

Robert McKersie and his co-author Richard Walton (Emeritus, HBS) were honored by the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA) at a symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of their 1965 classic book, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations. LERA presented McKersie and Walton with a citation that described the book as “A Landmark Contribution to Industrial Relations and Social Science Theory, Teaching, and Practice.”

Jared Curhan has won a 2019 Teaching with Digital Technology Award from MIT for his work in the 15.672 (Negotiation Analysis) class. This student-nominated award recognizes faculty and instructors who have used digital technology to improve teaching and learning for MIT students. Student nominations particularly praised Curhan’s use of an online platform and interactive application to facilitate and enhance experiential learning in the classroom. The awards are co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor. 
Curhan is the first winner from Sloan for this relatively new award.  

Michael Cusumano has won the 2019 Abbie Griffin High Impact Award, which recognizes the most influential article published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management in the last five years. Cusumano’s winning paper, co-authored with Annabelle Gawar (University of Surrey, UK;  2000 MIT Sloan PhD in Management of Technology and Innovation), is entitled, “Industry Platforms and Ecosystem Innovation” (Journal of Product Innovation Management (2014) 31(3):417-433). The selection committee noted that his paper addresses “a very important topic in today’s academic research as well as managerial practice,” has “a large number of citations from the very best academic journals,” and includes “a number of concrete industry examples, and importantly, provides a set of managerial practices for effective platform leadership,” as well as outlining “several relevant platform-related research questions that are being tackled by researchers.”

David Rand has won the 2020 Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS) Early Career Impact Award of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM). This award recognizes early-career scientists of FABBS member societies who have made major research contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior, especially those whose outstanding research contributions are accompanied by outreach activities that increase public awareness of science.  Second, Rand is a winner of the inaugural AMA-EBSCO Annual Award for Responsible Research in Marketing from the American Marketing Association, with financial support from EBSCO and in partnership with the Sheth Foundation and Responsible Research in Business & Management network. The award honors outstanding research that produces both credible and useful knowledge that can be applied to benefit society. 
Rand’s nominated paper for the award, co-authored with Gordon T. Kraft-Todd (Yale), Bryan Bollinger (Duke Fuqua School of Business), Kenneth Gillingham (Yale School of Management), and Stefan Lamp (Toulouse School of Economics), is entitled “Credibility-enhancing displays promote the provision of non-normative public goods” (Nature 563, 245-248 (2018). The paper was deemed to exemplify the Seven Principles of Responsible Research, in support of “better marketing for a better world.” 

Joann de Zegher won the People’s Choice Award at the 2019 Early-Career Sustainable OM Workshop, where she presented her most recent working paper.  Her winning working paper, co-authored with Hamsa Bastani (Wharton), is entitled, “Do Policies with Limited Enforcement Reduce Harm? Evidence from Transshipment Bans.”

Dimitris Bertsimas has been named the 2016 IFORS Distinguished Lecturer by the International Federation of Operational Research Societies.  He delivered this lecture at the 28th European Conference on Operational Research, at the Poznan University of Technology in Poland, on July 4, 2016.

Dimitris Bertsimas has received the 2016 Harold Larnder Prize, an annual award recognizing an individual who has achieved international distinction in operational research, from the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS). He delivered the Harold Larnder Memorial Lecture at the 58th Annual CORS Conference, at the Banff Centre in Canada, on May 30, 2016.