Faculty

Roberto Rigobon, Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and Professor of Applied Economics, has won the Best Paper Award from the Miami University Finance and Real Estate Conference 2025.

Rigobon’s winning paper, titled “Timing Sustainable Shareholder Proposals in Real Asset Investments,” is co-authored with Bram van der Kroft (MIT Climate & Sustainability Consortium Impact Fellow), Juan Palacios (Visiting Faculty at MIT Center for Real Estate; Maastricht University), and Siqi Zheng (Faculty Director of MIT Center for Real Estate; STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability).

The award was presented at the Finance and Real Estate Conference 2025, held at the Miami University Farmer School of Business in Oxford, Ohio.

The 2025 Financial Times Responsible Business Awards has recognized the following MIT Sloan-affiliated faculty and staff:  Florian Berg (principal research scientist; lecturer; Aggregate Confusion project co-founder), Julian Koelbel (research affiliate; Aggregate Confusion project co-founder), Roberto Rigobon (Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and professor of Applied Economics; faculty director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative), Jason Jay (director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative; senior lecturer), John Sterman (Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management and professor of System Dynamics; co-faculty director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative), Andrew Jones (executive director and co-founder of Climate Interactive; research affiliate), Bethany Patten (executive director of MIT Climate Policy Center; senior lecturer), Krystal Noiseux (senior associate director of MIT Climate Pathways Project), and Michael Sonnenfeldt (Climate Pathways Project Leadership team; founder and chairman of MUUS & Company). These awards recognize faculty, researchers, and students for positive societal and environmental impact achieved at business schools in three categories: academic projects which impact policy or practice, teaching based on innovative research, and student start-up or non-profit projects.

MIT Sloan’s Aggregate Confusion Project (led by Berg, Jay, Koelbel, and Rigobon) was a winner in the “Academic research with impact” category. The Aggregate Confusion Project is addressing problematic inconsistency in ESG (environmental, social, and governance) ratings by advocating for more transparency and better methodologies to improve the quality of ESG measurement in the financial sector. Their research has had significant impact on policymakers, rating agencies, investors, and regulators, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the same category for impactful academic research, the MIT Climate Policy Center’s Climate Pathways Project a “Highly Commended” designation (recognizing Sterman, Jones, Patten, Sonnenfeldt, Jay, and Noiseux). The CPP leverages interactive simulations C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support) and En-ROADS, co-developed by Climate Interactive and MIT Sloan, to test and visualize global impacts of policies and advance the adoption of evidence-based climate policy through public- and private-sector leaders.

Also “Highly Commended,” in the category for teaching based on innovative research, were Jay and Sterman for integrating the Sustainability Initiative’s transition risk assignment using the En-ROADS climate solutions simulator into the curriculum of both MBA and executive-education students, enabling them to assess climate change transition risks for businesses in real-world contexts.

The awards were announced (for research and teaching above) in January 2025.

Negin Golrezaei, Theresa Seley Associate Professor in Management Science and Associate Professor of Operations Management, has received two honors:

First, Golrezaei won the 2025 Best Operations Management Paper in Operations Research Award from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society. This biennial award recognizes “the most significant contribution to the theory and practice of operations management” published in the journal in the preceding four years.

Golrezaei’s winning paper, “Learning Product Rankings Robust to Fake Users” (Operations Research 71(4):1171-1196, 2022), was co-authored with Vahideh Manshadi (Yale University), Jon Schneider (Google Research New York), and Shreyas Sekar (University of Toronto Scarborough). The paper addresses a growing challenge in digital platforms: how to learn product rankings when the platform is manipulated by fake users — such as those generated by click farms.

The award was presented in June at the 2025 INFORMS MSOM Conference in London.

Second, Golrezaei was selected for the Poets & Quants 2025 Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors list.

Steven Spear’s book, “Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness Through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification” (2023, IT Revolution), which was co-authored with Gene Kim (founder and former CTO of Tripwire), has received two honors.

First, “Wiring the Winning Organization” won the Shingo Publication Award from the Shingo Institute at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. This award, which is particularly interested in recognizing thought leadership, “recognizes and promotes writing that has had a significant impact and advances the body of knowledge regarding organizational excellence.” This is the sixth time one of Spear’s publications has received this honor in the past 25 years. 

Second, the book received the 2025 Crosby Medal from the American Society for Quality, which recognizes a “distinguished book contributing significantly to the extension of the philosophy and application of the principles, methods, or techniques of quality management.” The citation notes “creating a groundbreaking approach to organizational management with “Wiring the Winning Organization,” bringing together modern ways of working [methodologies] like lean, DevOps, and agile into one universal approach that leaders of any size organization can use to enable their employees to excel and their organizations to thrive.” This is the second of Spear’s books to receive this award.

Retsef Levi has been chosen to serve on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. This committee provides advice and guidance to leaders of the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This appointment is for four years. 

Simon Johnson has been chosen by the Carnegie Corporation of New York for its 2025 Class of Great Immigrants, Great Americans. This honor recognizes “20 distinguished naturalized American citizens whose contributions have enriched our society and helped to strengthen our democracy”—“leaders across academia, the arts, business, journalism, medicine, philanthropy, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).”

The 2025 Class of Great Immigrants, Great Americans was announced in June of 2025, and the honorees were recognized with a full-page public service announcement in The New York Times on July 4, 2025.

Assistant professor Lira Mota and assistant professor Kerry Siani have won the 2025 North America Best Paper in Corporate Finance from the Society for Financial Studies (SFS).

Their winning working paper is titled “Financially Sophisticated Firms: A Demand-Based Approach to Corporate Financing.”

The award was presented in May 2025 in Hoboken, NJ, at SFS Cavalcade North America 2025, an annual conference that is a joint project of the Review of Financial Studies, Review of Corporate Finance Studies, and Review of Asset Pricing Studies.

Senior Lecturer Chris Noe and Professor Eric So have each won a 2025 Teaching with Digital Technology Award from MIT for their innovative use of digital tools in their teaching. 

These student-nominated, student-judged awards recognize faculty and instructors who have effectively used digital technology to improve teaching and learning at MIT. This recognition also gives the community the opportunity to learn from their innovative practices.

The awards are co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor. This year students submitted 88 nominations, and seven winners were selected and celebrated at an awards luncheon.

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.

Dimitris Bertsimas (MIT Vice Provost for Open Learning and at MIT Sloan, Associate Dean for Business Analytics, Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management, and Professor of Operations Research) has received the 2025-26 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, the highest honor given by the MIT faculty to its own professors, to recognize “extraordinary professional achievement.”

The Killian Award citation notes that his “scholarly contributions are both vast and groundbreaking" and that Bertsimas, “through his remarkable intellectual breadth and accomplishments, incredible productivity, outstanding contributions to theory and practice, and educational leadership, has made enormous contributions to his profession, the Institute, and the world."

As is tradition, Bertsimas will deliver the Killian Award Lecture in the spring of 2026 to share about his work with the MIT community.