Faculty

John Little was honored by friends, colleagues, former students, and many others at a "John D. C. Little Festschrift Celebration," which took place June 6-7 at the 2009 INFORMS Marketing Science Conference held at the University of Michigan. A festschrift is a volume of papers written to honor an individual, which in Little's case, will eventually include about 20 papers and be published in 2010. Among John's achievements, he is famous for Little's Law in queuing, decision calculus models for marketing managers, his paper on marketing decision support systems, and his role in creating marketing science as a field. Other well-known research by John includes papers on choosing advertising media schedules, adaptive control of promotional spending, brand-size choice models calibrated on scanner panel data, and marketing mix models for consumer packaged goods.

John Little received the 2014 Sheth Foundation Medal for Exceptional Contribution to Marketing Scholarship and Practice. The award recognizes "enduring and transformational contributions" to both marketing scholarship and marketing practice. He received the award at an exclusive banquet during the annual INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, at Emory University in Atlanta. A special session followed, in which Professors John Hauser of MIT, Jim Lattin of Stanford, and John Roberts of the London Business School described Little's marketing accomplishments in detail.

Robert Merton has received MIT’s 2021-2022 James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, which recognizes “extraordinary professional achievement by MIT faculty members” and is MIT’s highest faculty honor.

As “one of the founding architects of modern finance theory,” Merton’s work has “become an integral part of the global financial system”; the Killian Award citation notes his “profound commitment to innovation through scientific research and to advancing pedagogy in financial economics, as well as to serving as a highly valued mentor to graduate students and junior colleagues.” As the 2021-2022 Killian Award Lecturer, Merton will share about his professional activities and accomplishments with the MIT community.

More details on Merton’s receiving the award and on his career achievements can be found in this MIT News article.

 Leonid Kogan has won the NASDAQ Award from the Western Finance Association for the best paper on asset pricing.  Kogan’s winning paper, co-authored with Winston Dou (Wharton) and Wei Wu (Texas A&M), is entitled, “Common Fund Flows: Flow Hedging and Factor Pricing.”

Kristin Forbes was named a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a nonpartisan and independent national membership organization, think tank, and publisher. The CFR is dedicated to being a resource for policymakers and interested citizens to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.

"The Trilateral Commission is a non-governmental, policy-oriented discussion group of about 350 distinguished citizens from Western Europe, North America and Pacific Asia formed to encourage mutual understanding and closer cooperation among these three regions on common problems."

Leonid Kogan has won the 2014 Amundi Smith Breeden Prize (first prize) for the best paper in The Journal of Finance, which is the official publication of the American Finance Association and one of the most widely cited academic journals in finance and economics. His winning paper (co-authored with D. Papanikolaou of Kellogg) is entitled “Growth Opportunities, Technology Shocks, and Asset Prices.”

Andrew Lo and Kara Blackburn were each awarded the 2019 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.

Lori Breslow has been honored as co-author of one of the Top Ten AERA (American Educational Research Association) Journal Articles in 2014. The article, co-authored with Jennifer DeBoer (Purdue), Glenda Stump (ASU), and Andrew Ho (Harvard), is entitled “Changing ‘Course’: Reconceptualizing Variables for Massive Open Online Courses.”

Andrew W. Lo’s book "Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought" (Princeton University Press, 2017) has won the 2018 Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) Award for Excellence in Social Sciences, from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. The annual awards recognize “the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in 58 categories” and have been judged since 1976 by peer publishers, librarians, and medical professionals. The award was presented during the PSP Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.