Faculty

Kara Blackburn has won a 2020 Teaching with Digital Technology Award from MIT for her work teaching on campus and/or remotely. Blackburn won the award along with fellow Sloan faculty members Vivek Farias, 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. 

Ben Shields has won a 2020 Teaching with Digital Technology Award from MIT for his work teaching on campus and/or remotely. Shields won the award along with fellow Sloan faculty members Kara Blackburn, Vivek Farias, Michelle Hanlon, Alexandre Jacquillat, Miro Kazakoff, 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. 

Nathan Wilmers has won the Academy of Management, Organizational and Management Theory Division 2020 Best Paper Award. Wilmers was honored for his paper, “Wage Stagnation and Buyer Power: How Buyer-Supplier Relations Affect U.S. Workers’ Wages, 1978-2014.” This award recognizes “the empirical or conceptual paper submitted to the Academy of Management annual meeting that offers a significant contribution to the field of organization and management theory.”

Ernst Berndt has been selected to receive the 2020 Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics, which recognizes unusually original and important contributions to the development of economic statistics or to their use in interpreting the economy. In particular, the award recognizes Berndt “for conducting original and influential economic research on the measurement of multifactor productivity and quality-adjusted price change and for his leadership of key groups both within and with linkages to the U.S. economic statistics community.” More details on Berndt’s many contributions are in this press release. The award is sponsored by the Business and Economic Statistics section of the American Statistical Association, the National Association for Business Economics, and the Washington Statistical Society. The award was announced  on the ASA B&E section website. 

Swati Gupta won the Class of 1934 CIOS Honor Roll in both 2021 and 2020 at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Gupta won this honor while she was an assistant professor and Fouts Family Early Career Professor there.

Lotte Bailyn is being recognized with an honorary doctorate (Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa) from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for her “groundbreaking work” and “academic and public leadership in promoting the equal integration of women into the labor force more generally and particularly into the fields of science and technology.” 

This honor recognizes how Bailyn’s “innovative research in the field of work-family reconciliation has advanced both the academic and corporate realms,” noting that her work “surfaced the challenges associated with bridging work and family obligations not only as individuals’ and families’ mission, but as organizational and social issues,” leading to “the development of solutions that benefit both employees and employers around the world.” In addition, her “profound understanding of career dynamics and gender equity in the fields of science and technology facilitated women’s struggle to gain public recognition for the discrimination they suffer in their academic and scientific careers,” and her leadership “has played a crucial role” in “cooperation among leading universities around the world” to develop “policies for mitigating the marginalization and exclusion [of] women and other social minorities.”

Robert Freund won the Samuel M. Seegal Faculty Prize, which was established by Paula Seegal-Thompson for her father, a member of the class of 1922. The Seegal Prize is shared with the MIT School of Engineering and is awarded every other year to a professor “who inspires students in pursuing and achieving excellence.”  The Seegal faculty prize is selected by a review committee at MIT.

Y. Karen Zheng and Retsef Levi have won the 2020 MSOM  Responsible Research in Operations Management award for the paper “The Impact of Unifying Agriculture Wholesale Markets on Prices and Farmers' Profitability,” coauthored with Manoj Rajan and Somya Singhvi. MSOM, which stands for Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, presents this award in order to encourage studies that may “make the world a better place,” through “evidence-based” practices. 

Retsef Levi and Y. Karen Zheng have won the 2020 MSOM Responsible Research in Operations Management award for the paper, “The Impact of Unifying Agriculture Wholesale Markets on Prices and Farmers' Profitability,” coauthored with Manoj Rajan and Somya Singhvi. MSOM, which stands for Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, presents this award in order to encourage studies that may “make the world a better place,” through “evidence-based” practices. 

S.P. Kothari is the recipient of a 2020 Padma Shri Award, one of the highest civilian honors offered by the Government of India for distinguished service in any field. Kothari’s Padma Shri Award (the fourth-highest civilian award in the country) is in the field of “Literature and Education,” and the citation notes “his valuable contribution in the fields of finance and academia.” Kothari is currently on leave from MIT Sloan, serving since March of last year as Chief Economist and Director of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.