Georgia Perakis

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.
 

Georgia Perakis’s appointment as editor-in-chief for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM), effective January 1, 2021 for a three-year term, has been approved by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Board of Directors. M&SOM, published quarterly, is the premier operations management journal. In addition to the appointment reflecting her outstanding record and reputation in the operations management research community, Perakis has the noteworthy distinction of being the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief at any of the top journals in the field—M&SOM, Management Science, Operations Research, and Production and Operations Management.

Georgia Perakis has received the 2017 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Best Paper of the Service Science Section Cluster Award. Finalists for this award were selected from nominated papers in the section’s cluster of sponsored research papers and were invited to present their work in a Best Paper Award Competition session during the INFORMS annual meeting in October.

The winning paper, co-authored with Anna M. Papush (MIT Operations Research Center doctoral student) and Pavithra Harsha, PhD ’09 (IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and past MIT Operations Research Center doctoral student), is entitled “A Data-Driven Approach to Personalized Bundle Pricing and Recommendation.”

Perakis actually was a finalist for this award for two papers—the other was “A Ranking Algorithm for Shipping in the Spot Market,” co-authored with Max R. Biggs (MIT Operations Research Center doctoral student).

Georgia Perakis has received the 2018 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Best Paper of the Service Science Section Cluster Award, an award she has won three years in a row. Finalists for this honor were selected from nominated papers in the section’s cluster of sponsored research papers and were invited to present their work in a Best Paper Award Competition session during the INFORMS Annual Meeting. The winning paper, co-authored with Tamar Cohen-Hillel (MIT ORC PhD student) and Kiran Panchamgam (Oracle RGBU (Retail Global Business Unit), is entitled “High-Low Promotion Policies for Peak-End Demand Models” (only the abstract is currently available).

Georgia Perakis has received two Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) honors. First, she received the 2021 Distinguished Fellow Award from the INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society. This rare distinction recognizes outstanding research and scholarship in operations management.

The citation notes Perakis’ “exceptional research, spanning theory to practice with fundamental contributions to the price of anarchy, dynamic pricing and data analytics,” with “research impact felt not just through the papers she has generated and the many practical innovations that have arisen from those papers, but also through how transformative it has been on the lives of many of the people she works with.” In addition, Perakis received honorable mention (second place) in the INFORMS 2020/21 M&SOM Practice-Based Research Competition, which recognizes outstanding unpublished operations management research papers with a high potential or realized impact on practice.  (Jónas Oddur Jónasson won first place, so MIT Sloan faculty won both prizes).

Perakis’ honored paper describing work with Wayfair, “Ancillary Services in Targeted Advertising: from Prediction to Prescription” (MIT Sloan Working Paper 6239-20) was co-authored with Divya Singhvi (IBM Research AI Residency Program; MIT ORC PhD ‘20), Omar Skali Lami (MIT ORC PhD student; MIT Sloan MBAn ’17), Alison Borenstein (Assurance IQ; MIT Sloan MBAn ’20), Jiong Wei Lua (Singapore National Service; MIT Sloan MBAn ’20), and Ankit Mangal and Stefan Poninghaus (both of Wayfair).

 

Georgia Perakis has been selected to be an INFORMS Fellow, Class of 2016. The INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) award honors “distinguished individuals who have demonstrated outstanding and exceptional accomplishments in operations research and the management sciences.” Perakis was cited for “exceptional research, spanning theory to practice with important contributions to variational inequalities, the price of anarchy, dynamic pricing and data analytics, and for her dedicated mentorship of a future generation of operations research scholars.”

Georgia Perakis has recently won four awards for three different papers:

First, Perakis won the 2019 Best Operations Management Paper in Management Science Award from the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society of INFORMS, which is the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. This award honors Perakis’ outstanding contribution to the theory and practice of operations management among the prior three years of articles published in Management Science.

Perakis' winning paper, co-authored with her former PhD students from the MIT Operations Research Center, Maxime Cohen (formerly NYU Stern; now McGill University) and Ruben Lobel (formerly Wharton; now Airbnb), is entitled, “The Impact of Demand Uncertainty on Consumer Subsidies for Green Technology Adoption” (Management Science (2016) 62(5):1235-1258).This paper also received Honorable Mention for the 2019 ENRE (Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment Section of INFORMS) Best Publication Award in Environment and Sustainability, recognizing Perakis’ contributions to the field of environment and sustainability in Operations Research & Management Science.

In addition, Perakis won Second Place for the 2019 INFORMS Service Science Best Paper Award, for “Learning Personalized Product Recommendations with Customer Disengagement” (currently under second round of review at Manufacturing & Service Operations Management), co-authored with Divya Singhvi (ORC PhD student of Perakis), Pavithra Harsha (ORC graduate; IBM Research), and Hamsa Bastani (Wharton).Perakis additionally won Honorable Mention (second place) in the 3^rd MSOM Practice-Based Research Competition during the MSOM Conference last July, recognizing the high quality and significant practical relevance of her paper entitled, “Detecting Customer Trends for Optimal Promotion Targeting” (forthcoming in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management), co-authored with Lennart Baardman (ORC graduate; Michigan Ross), Tamar Cohen-Hillel (ORC PhD student of Perakis), and Setareh Borjian and Kiran Panchamgam (both at Oracle).

Georgia Perakis has won first prize in the 3rd Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) Applied Research Challenge (ARC), a biennial competition recognizing rigorous applied research that is innovative and relevant to practice in its managerial insights, implementable ideas, and impact on practice and research. An academic panel selected finalists to present their work at the 2018 POMS Annual Meeting, and a practitioner judge panel of recognized practice leaders selected the winner. Perakis’s winning paper, co-authored with her MIT Operations Research Center PhD students Lennart Baardman and Divya Singhvi as well as industry collaborator Igor Levin (Johnson & Johnson), is entitled “Leveraging Comparables for New Product Sales Forecasting.” An extended abstract of the paper will be published in Production and Operations Management (POM), and the paper is currently under review for publication at Operations Research.

Georgia Perakis (William F. Pounds Professor of Management; Professor of Operations Management and of Operations Research and Statistics and Associate Dean of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and at MIT Sloan) has received the 2022 Award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS from the INFORMS Forum for Women in OR/MS. 

This award celebrates and recognizes Perakis for her significant contributions to the advancement and recognition of women in the field of Operations Research and the Management Sciences, honoring her dedicated history of successfully promoting their professional development, success, and recognition.

Georgia Perakis won the 2016 Best Paper Award Competition of the INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Service Science Section. Her winning paper, co-authored with Lennart Baardman (MIT Operations Research Center PhD student), Maxime C. Cohen (New York University Stern School of Business assistant professor), Kiran Panchamgam (Oracle Retail Science), and Danny Segev (University of Haifa Dept. of Statistics), is entitled “Scheduling Promotion Vehicles to Boost Profits.”