Faculty

Otto Scharmer has received the Leonardo Award 2016 in Thought Leadership, a Leonardo European Corporate Learning Award addressing the “future of learning.” The award recognizes the value and contribution of Scharmer’s management method “Theory U.”

Otto Scharmer is the inaugural recipient of the Elevating Humanity Award from the Organization Development (OD) Network. Scharmer is credited with directly inspiring this new annual award by championing the Organization Development “countermovement” against the traditional profit-centric management approach, “bringing humanity back into focus” with his book Theory U and, as co-founder of the Presencing Institute, “elevating humankind on a global scale through the Presencing Institute’s collective effort to help oppressed, marginalized, impoverished, and fractured populations” (Professor Bill Brendel, OD Network Board Trustee). More information on the impact of Scharmer’s work can be found in the award announcement in this OD Network News article. 

 

Otto Scharmer and Dimitris Bertsimas were each awarded the 2015 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.

Erin Scott and Scott Stern have each won the 2021 Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award from the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management, for their Entrepreneurial Strategy course developed with co-winner Joshua Gans (University of Toronto) and first launched at MIT Sloan and the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.
This annual award, sponsored by Yeshiva University, honors development and implementation of an innovation in entrepreneurship pedagogy. Evaluation of entrepreneurship courses is based on the innovativeness of the content and pedagogical process, demonstrated and potential impact and transferability, and the course’s relevance (to both students and entrepreneurial practice). The award committee recognized Entrepreneurial Strategy as “one of the very finest innovations in the area of entrepreneurship this year.”

 Ben Shields and Christopher Palmer (Finance) were each awarded the 2022 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.

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. 

Kerry Siani (Assistant Professor of Finance) has won an MIT Sloan School Outstanding Teacher Award for the 2022-2023 academic year. Mohammed Fazel Zarandi (Senior Lecturer in Operations Research/Statistics; Research Scientist) 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.”

Duncan Simester and Catherine Tucker have won the 2020 Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award from the American Marketing Association. This award recognizes a Journal of Marketing Research article published five years earlier that has made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice. Their winning paper, “Harbingers of Failure” (Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 52, No. 5, October 2015), was co-authored with Song Lin (HKUST Business School), who was an MIT Sloan PhD student when the paper was written (PhD 2015), and Eric Anderson (Kellogg School of Management), who also obtained his PhD at MIT Sloan (in 1995).

Simon Johnson and Kristin Forbes have recently been appointed to the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers. The Congressional Budget Office is the non-partisan organization that provides the formal analysis for Congress -- most importantly the estimates of the costs of different proposals that are then used as inputs for proposed legislation and the Congressional budget process.

Sinan Aral has been appointed to serve on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Alan Turing Institute in London — the British national institute for data science, headquartered at the British Library. Created in 2015 by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and five founding universities (Cambridge, Oxford,  Edinburgh, University College London, and Warwick), the Institute’s mission is “to make great leaps in data science research in order to change the world for the better.” The seven-member Scientific Advisory Board, an independent group which will provide strategic advice to the institute’s Board of Trustees and leadership team on its research program, includes experts from organizations around the world in academia, industry, and government, with a diverse range of skills and specializations spanning privacy, machine learning, engineering, microeconomics, and entrepreneurship.