Faculty

 Stephen Graves has been elected president-elect of INFORMs and will serve as its president in 2021. Graves is the Abraham J. Siegel Professor of Management and a professor of operations management at MIT Sloan, and his research focuses on supply-chain optimization, manufacturing flexibility and tactical issues in online retailing. Graves has been a member of INFORMS since he joined as a student in 1974. According to INFORMS, it is the largest international association of operations research and analytics professionals and students.

Steve Graves has received the INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society’s 2017 Manufacturing & Service Operations Management Best Paper Award. This annual award recognizes a paper, from among those published in the prior three volumes of Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, for its contribution to the theory and practice of operations management.

The winning paper, co-authored with Jason Acimovic (Penn State University Smeal College of Business and past MIT Operations Research Center doctoral student), is entitled “Making Better Fulfillment Decisions on the Fly in an Online Retail Environment” (Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 17(1):34-51).

The award was presented at the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society’s business meeting during the 2017 INFORMS annual meeting in Houston.

Leigh Hafrey, senior lecturer, is one of several faculty members at MIT Sloan who have won the 2019 Ideas Worth Teaching Award from The Aspen Institute’s Business & Society Program. The other MIT Sloan winners are Barbara Dyer, Christine Kelly, and Thomas Kochan. This award recognizes 10 exceptional courses, and honors faculty who are redefining business education, providing learning experiences that equip managers of tomorrow with the context, skills, and decision-making capabilities needed to lead in an increasingly complex business environment and world. The award celebrates innovative teaching that challenges conventional thinking and tests new approaches to divisive issues, rethinking the path forward for business and society and preparing students to make business decisions that create both financial and social value.

The winning course, 15.S02 “Bridging the American Divides: Work Community and Culture —USA Lab,” is MIT Sloan’s U.S.-focused Action Learning Lab, developed by the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative at MIT Sloan in partnership with the MIT Mens et Manus America Initiative and MIT Sloan Action Learning.

Michelle Hanlon has won the 2020 Distinguished Contributions to Accounting Literature Award from the American Accounting Association. This annual reward recognizes “uniqueness and magnitude of contribution to accounting education, practice and/or future accounting research” from among works published 5-15 years prior. Hanlon’s winning paper, co-authored with Scott D. Dyreng (Duke Fuqua) and Edward L. Maydew (UNC Kenan-Flagler), is entitled “Long-Run Corporate Tax Avoidance” (The Accounting Review, Vol. 83, No. 1, Jan. 2008).

Michelle Hanlon has won an MIT Sloan School Outstanding Teacher Award for the 2020-2021 academic year.  Arathi Mehrotra in Managerial Communication also won an Outstanding Teacher Award.  Each year, students nominate instructors for these teaching awards and the final recipients are chosen based on the quantity and quality of their nominations. Deputy Dean Michael Cusumano thanked the winners of this year's teaching awards for "exemplifying the dedication to pedagogical excellence that is so central to our mission at MIT Sloan."

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

Hazhir Rahmandad has won the System Dynamics Society’s Jay Wright Forrester Award. This is the top prize in the field, given at most once annually for the best published work in System Dynamics during the previous five years. Rahmandad was recognized for his 2012 paper in Organization Science, entitled “Impact of Growth Opportunities and Competition on Firm-Level Capability Development Trade-offs.”

Fiona Murray has been appointed Dame Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (DCMG) by His Majesty King Charles III. This honor recognizes “preeminent contributions overseas and in international affairs.” A DCMG is among the most prestigious honors bestowed in the United Kingdom. 

The citation recognizes Murray “for a sustained and highly influential contribution to U.K. strategy and policy in science and technology over the past eight years as a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology”; additionally, “she has supported and enhanced the country’s reputation in this field with the United States – the U.K.’s preeminent partner in science and technology – as associate dean of innovation” at the MIT Sloan School of Management. 

This appointment was announced in His Majesty the King’s first New Year Honours List, published on December 30, 2022. Recipients traditionally receive the insignia of the Order from His Majesty or a senior member of the Royal Family at a Royal residence in the U.K., at an Investiture ceremony during the summer.

John Horton, the Richard S. Leghorn (1939) Career Development Associate Professor and Associate Professor of Information Technology, has won two awards.

First, Horton is a winner of the 2021 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) ISS Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award, which recognizes “early career individuals who are on a path towards making outstanding intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline.” 

Second, Horton won the AI/ML Rising Star Award at the 2021 Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Business Analytics, where he was also a keynote speaker. 

Juanjuan Zhang has won the 2019 INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Society for Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award. This honor is given annually to a Marketing Science, Management Science, or another INFORMS journal publication that is viewed to have made a significant long-run impact on the field of marketing. Zhang’s recognized paper is entitled, “The Sound of Silence: Observational Learning in the U.S. Kidney Market” (Marketing Science (2010) 29(2):315-335).