Faculty

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.

Duncan Simester, NTU Professor of Marketing, has received the 2022 INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) Fellow Award.  This honor recognizes cumulative long-term contribution (through research, education, service, and practice) to the mission of ISMS, which is “to foster the development, dissemination, and implementation of knowledge, basic and applied research, and science and technologies that improve the understanding and practice of marketing.” ISMS Fellows provide leadership and support for the ISMS community.

Georgia Perakis has received the 2018 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Best Paper of the Service Science Section Cluster Award, an award she has won three years in a row. Finalists for this honor were selected from nominated papers in the section’s cluster of sponsored research papers and were invited to present their work in a Best Paper Award Competition session during the INFORMS Annual Meeting. The winning paper, co-authored with Tamar Cohen-Hillel (MIT ORC PhD student) and Kiran Panchamgam (Oracle RGBU (Retail Global Business Unit), is entitled “High-Low Promotion Policies for Peak-End Demand Models” (only the abstract is currently available).

Dimitris Bertsimas has won two major awards from INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). First, Bertsimas won the 2019 John von Neumann Theory Prize for his having made fundamental, sustained contributions to theory in operations research and the management sciences. The award’s criteria are broad and include significance, innovation, depth, and scientific excellence. The prize recognizes his body of work’s contributions that have stood the test of time.

Bertsimas also won the 2019 INFORMS President’s Award, recognizing important contributions to the welfare of society.

Vivek Farias has won the 2020 INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Young Scholar Prize. The prize is an early career  award that "recognizes exceptional young researchers who have made outstanding contributions to scholarship in operations management." Scholars of age 40 years or younger on January 31 of the year in which they are nominated are eligible for this award.

Rahul Mazumder, the Robert G. James Career Development Associate Professor and Associate Professor of Operations Research and Statistics, has won the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) 2021 Donald P. Gaver, Jr. Early Career Award, which recognizes creative and diverse work in the field of Operations Research by a tenure-track faculty member within 10 years of obtaining a PhD.

The award citation states that this honor was for Mazumder’s “outstanding and widely recognized research contributions at the interface of operations research, statistics, machine learning and optimization and their dissemination in software packages; for applying his research results to problems in industry and the government; and for mentoring of Ph.D. students.”

Georgia Perakis has received the 2017 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Best Paper of the Service Science Section Cluster Award. Finalists for this award were selected from nominated papers in the section’s cluster of sponsored research papers and were invited to present their work in a Best Paper Award Competition session during the INFORMS annual meeting in October.

The winning paper, co-authored with Anna M. Papush (MIT Operations Research Center doctoral student) and Pavithra Harsha, PhD ’09 (IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and past MIT Operations Research Center doctoral student), is entitled “A Data-Driven Approach to Personalized Bundle Pricing and Recommendation.”

Perakis actually was a finalist for this award for two papers—the other was “A Ranking Algorithm for Shipping in the Spot Market,” co-authored with Max R. Biggs (MIT Operations Research Center doctoral student).

Georgia Perakis has recently won four awards for three different papers:

First, Perakis won the 2019 Best Operations Management Paper in Management Science Award from the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society of INFORMS, which is the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. This award honors Perakis’ outstanding contribution to the theory and practice of operations management among the prior three years of articles published in Management Science.

Perakis' winning paper, co-authored with her former PhD students from the MIT Operations Research Center, Maxime Cohen (formerly NYU Stern; now McGill University) and Ruben Lobel (formerly Wharton; now Airbnb), is entitled, “The Impact of Demand Uncertainty on Consumer Subsidies for Green Technology Adoption” (Management Science (2016) 62(5):1235-1258).This paper also received Honorable Mention for the 2019 ENRE (Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment Section of INFORMS) Best Publication Award in Environment and Sustainability, recognizing Perakis’ contributions to the field of environment and sustainability in Operations Research & Management Science.

In addition, Perakis won Second Place for the 2019 INFORMS Service Science Best Paper Award, for “Learning Personalized Product Recommendations with Customer Disengagement” (currently under second round of review at Manufacturing & Service Operations Management), co-authored with Divya Singhvi (ORC PhD student of Perakis), Pavithra Harsha (ORC graduate; IBM Research), and Hamsa Bastani (Wharton).Perakis additionally won Honorable Mention (second place) in the 3^rd MSOM Practice-Based Research Competition during the MSOM Conference last July, recognizing the high quality and significant practical relevance of her paper entitled, “Detecting Customer Trends for Optimal Promotion Targeting” (forthcoming in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management), co-authored with Lennart Baardman (ORC graduate; Michigan Ross), Tamar Cohen-Hillel (ORC PhD student of Perakis), and Setareh Borjian and Kiran Panchamgam (both at Oracle).

Georgia Perakis (William F. Pounds Professor of Management; Professor of Operations Management and of Operations Research and Statistics and Associate Dean of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and at MIT Sloan) has received the 2022 Award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS from the INFORMS Forum for Women in OR/MS. 

This award celebrates and recognizes Perakis for her significant contributions to the advancement and recognition of women in the field of Operations Research and the Management Sciences, honoring her dedicated history of successfully promoting their professional development, success, and recognition.

The Leonard G. Abraham Prize is given annually to the best original paper published in the past year in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. Jim Orlin received the award for the paper, "Preconfiguring IP-over-Optical Networks to Handle Router Failures and Unpredictable Traffic," co-authored with Murali Kodialam, T. V. Lakshman, and Sudipta Sengupta.