Faculty

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has announced that professor Kristin Forbes, a research associate in the International Finance and Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics programs has joined the Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC).

Forbes is an expert on monetary policy, exchange rates, capital flows, and financial regulation who has also served in a number of important public policy roles, including as a member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and as a deputy assistant secretary at the US Department of the Treasury. 

Members of the BCDC are appointed by the NBER president, with approval of the BCDC committee chair and the chair of the NBER Board of Directors.

Arathi Mehrotra (Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication) and Adrien Verdelhan (Stephens Naphtal Professor of Finance) each received an Outstanding Teacher Award at the MIT Sloan Excellence in Teaching Awards. Each year, students nominate instructors for these teaching awards and the final recipients are chosen based on the quantity and quality of their nominations.

Mohammad Fazel-Zarandi, research scientist and senior lecturer, was named the MIT Sloan School Teacher of the Year. This is the second consecutive academic year that Fazel-Zarandi has been voted by students to receive this recognition. Each year, students nominate instructors for several teaching awards, and the final recipients are chosen based on the quantity and quality of their nominations. 

In addition to Teacher of the Year, Fazel-Zarandi also received the Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising, established by the MIT Graduate Student Council to recognize faculty demonstrating “unbounded compassion and dedication towards students."

Emil Verner and Rama Ramakrishnan were each awarded the 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.

The prize was announced for Verner and Ramakrishnan at the 2025 MIT Sloan Excellence in Teaching Awards for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Lotte Bailyn, the T Wilson (1953) Professor of Management, Emerita, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and will be formally inducted in October 2025. Bailyn was elected under the Educational and Academic Leadership section of the Academy.

Founded in 1780, the Cambridge, Mass.-based American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together, as expressed in its charter, “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” According to a press release, the Academy’s work has helped set the direction of research and analysis in science and technology policy, global security and international affairs, social policy, education, the humanities, and the arts.  

Other notable Academy members include early Americans such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. Other distinguished members have included Margaret Mead, Jonas Salk, Barbara McClintock, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, John Hope Franklin, Georgia O’Keeffe, E.O. Wilson, and Madeleine Albright. The Academy’s current members represent today’s innovative thinkers in every field and profession, including more than 250 Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners. 

All elected members are listed here.

Catherine Wolfram, the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy and a professor of Applied Economics at MIT Sloan, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and will be formally inducted in October 2025. 

Founded in 1780, the Cambridge, Mass.-based American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together, as expressed in its charter, “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” According to a press release, the Academy’s work has helped set the direction of research and analysis in science and technology policy, global security and international affairs, social policy, education, the humanities, and the arts.  

Other notable Academy members include early Americans such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. Other distinguished members have included Margaret Mead, Jonas Salk, Barbara McClintock, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, John Hope Franklin, Georgia O’Keeffe, E.O. Wilson, and Madeleine Albright. The Academy’s current members represent today’s innovative thinkers in every field and profession, including more than 250 Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners. A list of current Academy members in Economics (Wolfram’s field) is available here.

Mark Kritzman, CFA, senior lecturer in Finance, has won the CFA Institute Research Foundation's 2025 James R. Vertin Award.  According to a press release, this honor recognizes individuals who have produced a body of research notable for its relevance and enduring value to investment professionals. During his career, Kritzman has written numerous scholarly articles  and books that have shaped the fields of asset allocation, risk management, and decision science.

Emil Verner (Albert F. (1942) & Jeanne P. Clear Career Development Associate Professor in Global Management and Associate Professor of Finance) has received a 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which is “dedicated to improving the welfare of all through the advancement of scientific knowledge.” This honor recognizes outstanding creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments; the achievements and potential of awarded Sloan Research Fellows “place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada.”

Verner is one of seven 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 (Verner’s awarded area), mathematics, neuroscience, and physics.

Lawrence (Larry) D.W. Schmidt—Victor J. Menezes (1972) Career Development Assistant Professor of Finance—has won the 2024 Dimensional Fund Advisors Prize (First Prize), for the top paper published in The Journal of Finance in any area other than corporate finance (in the December 2023 issue and first five issues of 2024). This annual prize is given by the American Finance Association (publishers of The Journal of Finance) and sponsored by Dimensional Fund Advisors (prizes prior to 2019 were sponsored by Amundi Pioneer, Amundi Smith Breeden, and Smith Breeden, and named accordingly).

Schmidt’s winning paper, “Selling Fast and Buying Slow: Heuristics and Trading Performance of Institutional Investors,” was co-authored with Klakow Akepanidtaworn (International Monetary Fund), Rick Di Mascio (Inalytics), and Alex Imas (Chicago Booth) and published in the December 2023 issue of The Journal of Finance, 78(6), 3055-3098.

The award was announced online and presented at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association in January 2025 in San Francisco.

Jonathan Parker (Robert C. Merton (1970) Professor of Financial Economics and Professor of Finance) and Antoinette Schoar (Stewart C. Myers-Horn Family Professor of Finance) have won the 2024 TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security from the TIAA Institute.

Their winning paper, co-authored with Yang Sun (Brandeis University), is titled “Retail Financial Innovation and Stock Market Dynamics: The Case of Target Date Funds” (The Journal of Finance, Vol. 78, No. 5, October 2023). The paper shows that Target Date Fund (TDF) trading activity (with a strategy to sell stocks when the market does well and buy when it does poorly) helps stabilize stock prices and may dampen overall market volatility. “While earlier research has focused on benefits [of Target Date Fund (TDF) holdings within retirement plans] to individual investors, the authors advance the literature by analyzing TDFs’ effects on asset markets. The results are relevant for academics, practitioners and policymakers alike” (Jonathan Reuter, Boston College—an award judge).

The award was announced and presented earlier in January 2025 at the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) in San Francisco.