Faculty

Steve Eppinger was invited to deliver the autumn 2019 Technical University of Denmark Ørsted Lecture. The aim of the lecture series is “to stimulate new thoughts and new scientific approaches by presenting topics that will change our future,” with “the most advanced and frontier breaking research.” This biannual event commemorates the university’s founder, Hans Christian Ørsted, who discovered electromagnetism. Eppinger joins a distinguished list of invited lecturers who are leading scientists from the fields of science and engineering, including several Nobel laureates.  The lecture is available to watch online.

Eric von Hippel was awarded the Innovation Luminary Award from the European Commission for his “excellent and groundbreaking work in…‘Democratizing Innovation.’” Earlier winners include Stephen Hawking, Richard Branson, and Bill Drayton. von Hippel also received the 2015 Innovative Management Partner (IMP) Excellence in Innovation Research Award from the University of Innsbruck School of Management, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to research in strategy and innovation.

Erin Kelly has won the 2015 Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research. The Center for Families at Purdue University and the Boston College Center for Work & Family developed this award to raise the awareness of high-quality work-family research among the scholar, consultant, and practitioner communities. This 15th Anniversary year, five finalists were selected by a committee of over 55 leading scholars.

Ernst Berndt has been recognized with an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel (Switzerland), for his “outstanding academic achievements in the fields of econometrics and health economics.” The university noted Berndt’s “research on the sources of innovation and the measurement of productivity,” as well as the methods he “implemented for adjusting prices of commodities whose characteristics significantly change over time.”

Maryam Farboodi has won the 2019 Young Researcher Award from the SCOR-PSE Chair on Macroeconomic Risk (created in 2018 by the SCOR Corporate Foundation for Science and the Paris School of Economics), honoring outstanding research by a junior economist (within 10 years of PhD) in the field of macroeconomic risk. The award recognizes Farboodi for her “particularly stimulating and promising” work in financial intermediation and deliberate exposure to counterparty risk:  “innovative research, both in method and hypothesis, on the relationships between financial institutions and how these relationships may contribute to endogenous growth in systemic risk,” according to André Levy-Lang, chairman of the SCOR Foundation for Science. Farboodi presented her working paper entitled “Intermediation and Voluntary Exposure to Counterparty Risk” (October 2017) and received her award at a ceremony in July 2019 in Paris during the SCOR-PSE Chair annual conference.

Maryam Farboodi has received the Outstanding Paper Award 2022 from the Swiss Finance Institute. This honor recognizes an unpublished research paper expected to make an outstanding contribution to the field of finance.

Farboodi’s winning paper, co-authored with Dhruv Singal (Columbia University), Laura Veldkamp (Columbia University),  and Venky Venkateswaran (New York University), is entitled “Valuing Financial Data.” It focuses on how an investor or financial firm should value financial data in today’s modern economy.

Vivek Farias (Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor and Professor of Operations Management), along with several students in his research group and a team at Anheuser-Busch InBev, has received the 2022 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). This award recognizes the successful use of operations research, analytics, and innovative mathematics in practice.

Farias' winning paper, “Generalized Synthetic Control for TestOps at ABI: Models, Algorithms, and Infrastructure,” was co-authored with MIT students Tianyi Peng, Luis Costa, Patricio Foncea, and Jingyuan (Donna) Gan; and from Anheuser-Busch InBev, Ivo Rosa Montenegro, Ayush Garg, Dusan Popovic, and Kumarjit Pathak.

More information about their work that “results in millions in monthly revenue” with its “profound applications of analytics and O.R. to understand experimental power relative to alternatives using physical retail experiments and the platform, ‘TestOps’,” is in the prize announcement.

The award was presented in October during the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, IN. 

Vivek Farias and Eric So (Accounting) were each awarded the 2020 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 Jamieson faculty prize is selected by a review committee at MIT.

Vivek Farias has won a 2020 Teaching with Digital Technology Award from MIT for his work teaching on campus and/or remotely. Farias won the award along with fellow Sloan faculty members Kara Blackburn, Michelle Hanlon, Alexandre Jacquillat, Miro Kazakoff, Ben Shields, and Rodrigo Verdi. These student-nominated awards recognize faculty and instructors who have used digital technology to improve teaching and learning for MIT students. This recognition also gives the MIT community the opportunity to learn from their innovative practices. The awards were co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor. This year, students submitted a total of 487 nominations for 232 faculty and instructors, and 30 winners were selected by Dean of Digital Learning Krishna Rajagopal and Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz, with help from MIT Open Learning staff. 

Vivek F. Farias’ paper, Primal-Dual Algorithms for Order Fulfillment at Urban Outfitters, Inc., was a Finalist for the INFORMS 2018 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. Farias’ co-authors were J.M. Andrews, A.I. Khojandi, and C.M. Yan. The Wagner Prize was established in 1998 to commemorate the life and work of Dr. Daniel H. Wagner.