Faculty

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.”

Daniel Freund, Class of 1947 Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Operations Management, has won the 2023 INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) MSOM (Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society) Best OM (Operations Management) Paper in Operations Research Award. This honor is bestowed every two years and recognizes an outstanding publication, from among those published in the preceding four years in Operations Research, “deemed to have made the most significant contribution to the theory and practice of operations management.”

Freund’s winning paper, co-authored with Shane G. Henderson and David B. Shmoys (both at Cornell University), is entitled, “Minimizing Multimodular Functions and Allocating Capacity in Bike-Sharing Systems” (Operations Research, 70(5): 2715-2731, 2022).

Rahul Mazumder, Nanyang Technological University Associate Professor of Operations Research and Statistics, has won the 2024 Leo Breiman Junior Award from the Statistical Learning and Data Science (SLDS) Section of the American Statistical Association. This award, given every two years, recognizes “outstanding theoretical or methodological contributions to machine learning and/or computational statistics” by a junior SLDS scholar (a senior scholar is also chosen for a Senior Award), “contributions which have made a substantial, sustained impact on the subject and on practical applications.”

Mazumder’s award specifically cites his outstanding contributions to optimization methods and their applications to statistical and machine learning problems.

Negin Golrezaei, Associate Professor of Operations Management, has won the 2023 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Minority Issues Forum (MIF) Paper Competition Award, which recognizes outstanding recent contributions of MIF members in the field of operations research, management science, or information systems.

Golrezaei’s winning paper, co-authored with Vahideh Manshadi (Yale), Jon Schneider (Google Research), and Shreyas Sekar (University of Toronto), is entitled “Learning Product Rankings Robust to Fake Users” (Operations Research, 71(4): 1171-1196, 2023).

Maryam Farboodi (Jon D. Gruber Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Finance) has received a 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which is “dedicated to improving the welfare of all through the advancement of scientific knowledge” and whose grantmaking helped create the MIT Sloan School of Management. This honor recognizes outstanding creativity, innovation, and impactful research; the achievements and potential of awarded Sloan Research Fellows “place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada.”

Farboodi is one of eight MIT faculty members among the 126 Sloan Research Fellows chosen this year from over 1,000 nominations of early-career scholars by fellow scientists across seven fields—chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics (Farboodi’s awarded area), mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. This prestigious honor has not been bestowed on an MIT Sloan faculty member for over two decades (and the one prior was over 30 years ago).

The award was announced recently.

Rahul Mazumder, Nanyang Technological University Associate Professor of Operations Research and Statistics, has won the 2023 International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) Early Career Award in Statistics and Data Sciences in the Theory category. This honor recognizes IISA members in early stages of their careers “for outstanding contributions in the development of theoretical foundations in statistics and data sciences, including but not limited to research in topics of mathematics related to statistics and data sciences, theoretical statistics and theory of machine learning, theoretical computer sciences, probability theory and mathematical studies of algorithms.”

Winners are typically celebrated at the annual IISA Conference, held in Kochi, India.

Mark Kritzman, Senior Lecturer in Finance, has won the 2023 Harry M. Markowitz Award from the Journal of Investment Management (JOIM). In addition, Andrew W. Lo, Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor; Professor of Finance; and Director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, was a finalist winning a 2023 Special Distinction Award. These awards honor Markowitz’s legacy and the seminal impact of his work as a financial economist and mathematician on both theoretical finance and the practice of asset management, by recognizing and supporting future research and innovation in practical asset management. Award candidates from among JOIM papers published in the past year are chosen by JOIM editors, and winners are selected by Nobel Prize laureate members of the JOIM Advisory Board.

Kritzman’s winning paper, “The Determinants of Inflation,” is co-authored with William Kinlaw (State Street Global Markets), Michael Metcalfe (State Street Global Markets), and David Turkington (State Street Associates).

Lo’s awarded paper, “Financing Fusion Energy,” is co-authored with Abdullah Alhamdan (Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of Saudi Arabia; MIT Sloan MBA ’21), Zachery M. Halem (Lazard; MIT SM ’21 in Operations Research), Irene Hernandez (Gataca; MIT Sloan MBA ’18), Manish Singh (Cubist Systematic Strategies; MIT Sloan Research Affiliate; MIT EECS PhD ’23), and Dennis Whyte (MIT Hitachi America Professor of Engineering and Director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center). This MIT Sloan article provides more information on the paper.

Tom Malone (Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technology), MIT Center for Collective Intelligence postdoctoral associates Jennifer Heyman and Steven Rick, and first-author Alice Cai have won the Best Paper Award at CI 2023, the Association for Computing Machinery Collective Intelligence Conference (ACM), sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction.

Their winning paper with Toyota Research Institute co-authors Yanxia Zhang, Alexandre Filipowicz, Matthew Hong, and Matt Klenk Is entitled, “DesignAID:  Using Generative AI and Semantic Diversity for Design Inspiration.”

Nikos Trichakis has received four honors from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), including one shared with Dimitris Bertsimas:

First, Trichakis won the 2023 Sanjay and Panna Mehrotra Research Excellence Award from the INFORMS Health Applications Society. This award recognizes a mid-career researcher for significant contributions to the practice of health applications through operations research and management science modeling and methodologies. This honor is specifically in recognition of Trichakis’s body of theoretical and practical work on affecting the national transplantation policy in the United States.

He also had 3 other paper honors:

Trichakis, along with MIT Sloan colleague Dimitris Bertsimas, was runner-up for the 2023 INFORMS Pierskalla Best Paper Award, which recognizes research excellence in the field of health care management science. The honored paper, co-authored with Bertsimas, Theodore Papalexopoulos (2022 MIT PhD in Operations Research), Darren Stewart (NYU Langone Health), and James Alcorn and Rebecca Goff (both of United Network for Organ Sharing), is entitled “Reshaping National Organ Allocation Policy.”

Trichakis also was a finalist for the 2023 Management Science Best Paper Award in Operations Management, which recognizes outstanding contributions to operations management among all operations papers published in Management Science over the past three years. “On the Financing Benefits of Supply Chain Transparency and Blockchain Adoption,” co-authored with Jiri Chod (Boston College), Gerry Tsoukalas (University of Pennsylvania; Boston University), Henry Aspegren (Meta; 2018 MIT MEng), and Mark Weber (IBM Research; MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab), was a finalist for this award the past two years in a row.

Finally, Trichakis was a finalist for the 2023 MSOM (Manufacturing and Service Operations Management section of INFORMS) iFORM (Interface of Finance, Operations, and Risk Management) Special Interest Group Best Paper award, which considers publications in all INFORMS journals in the prior three years, for “Platform Tokenization: Financing, Governance, and Moral Hazard” (Management Science), co-authored with Jiri Chod (Boston College) and S. Alex Yang (London Business School).