Faculty

David Gamarnik, Nanyang Technological University Professor of Operations Research, has recently received two fellow honors.

First, Gamarnik has been elected as an INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Fellow, Class of 2021. This honor recognizes “outstanding lifetime accomplishments and contributions in operations research and analytics.” Gamarnik was honored in particular “for fundamental contributions to the analysis of complex stochastic networks and the understanding of stochastic phenomena.” The 2021 INFORMS Fellows were announced in October 2021.

Second, Gamarnik has been selected for the 2022 Class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), in recognition of his outstanding contributions to mathematics and to the profession. Gamarnik was particularly cited for his “contributions to discrete probability and its applications to graph theory, statistical physics and the theory of algorithms.” The AMS Fellows were announced online recently.

Andrew W. Lo has been named Risk Manager of the Year for 2017 by the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP). Lo was cited for his “extensive and distinguished academic work and contributions to the risk management profession.” “Andrew is an inspiration to all of us who believe that risk management is everyone's responsibility and should be solidly embedded in the culture and decision-making processes of every organization,” said Richard Apostolik, GARP president and CEO. Apostolik added that Lo joins a distinguished line of honorees “who have contributed in exceptional ways to risk management and the risk profession.”

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 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.”

Glen Urban was named a Fellow of ISMS (the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science) at the 2009 INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, held earlier this month at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. The Fellows Awards are given in recognition of cumulative long-term contributions in research, practice, education, and service to the ISMS's efforts to improve the understanding and practice of marketing. Urban shares this honor with MIT Sloan colleagues and inaugural (2008) Fellows John Hauser and John Little.

Negin Golrezaei has won a 2018 Google Faculty Research Award in Algorithms and Optimization. These awards facilitate interaction between Google and academia (both faculty and graduate students) and support cutting-edge technical academic research (in computer science, engineering, and related fields), for projects whose output will be made available to the research community. The winners were chosen from among over 900 proposals received from 40 countries and over 320 universities. Golrezaei’s award will fund a graduate student for one year to work on her research project entitled, "Pricing and Bidding in Supply Chain of Auctions.”

Negin (Nicky) Golrezaei is the recipient of a 2021 Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Known as one of the oldest and most selective U.S. science and technology basic-research programs, the ONR YIP funds early-career academic researchers (investigators) “whose scientific pursuits show outstanding promise for supporting the Department of Defense, while also promoting their professional development.”

Following an extremely competitive selection process, the awards were announced recently. Golrezaei is one of three MIT awardees among the 38 scientists chosen from a broad spectrum of naval-relevant technical fields across science and engineering, “who show exceptional promise for doing creative research,” with “prior academic achievement and potential for significant scientific breakthrough” being key criteria.

Golrezaei’s three-year project, entitled “Finding a Needle in a Haystack:  Utilizing Structures and Predictive Information in Online Optimization,” will focus on designing powerful and fast-learning online learning algorithms that optimally take advantage of the structures and predictive information regarding the underlying time-varying combinatorial environments where decision-makers have a great deal of uncertainty about those environments. Her fast-learning algorithms will better equip decision-makers who face an exponentially large number of actions from which to choose, and the algorithms can be applied to a wide range of problems in support of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.

Jackson Lu has received the 2022 Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). This award recognizes “the best paper or article of the year on intergroup relations” and was named for Dr. Gordon W. Allport, an SPSSI founder and past president who is widely considered one of the founding fathers of the fields of social psychology and personality psychology.

Lu’s winning paper, entitled “Disentangling Stereotypes From Social Reality: Astrological Stereotypes and Discrimination in China,” was co-authored with Xin Lucy Liu (Peking University), Hui Liao (University of Maryland, College Park), and Lei Wang (Peking University).

Gordon Kaufman has been appointed the 2015 International Association of Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG) Distinguished Lecturer, responsible for giving a series of lectures. Kaufman gave the IAMG Distinguished Lecture at the Association’s Annual Conference in New Delhi last fall and has lectured at Stanford’s Petroleum Engineering Department and the U.S. Geological Survey’s University of Arizona branch.

Steve Graves has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for his “contributions to the modeling and analysis of manufacturing systems and supply chains.” Considered among the highest professional distinctions for an engineer, election to the NAE honors outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including … significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

The newly elected NAE class of 2018 will be formally inducted in Washington, D.C., later this year.