Faculty

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.

Jared Curhan received the "Most Influential Article" award from the Academy of Management (Conflict Management Division) at its 73rd Annual Meeting held in Orlando in early August. The winning paper, entitled "What do people value when they negotiate? Mapping the domain of subjective value in negotiation," is co-authored with Hillary Anger Elfenbein and Curhan's MIT Sloan doctoral student, Alice Xu.

The papers being reprinted in the Classics Issue is: Peter Guadagni and John Little, "A Logit Model of Brand Choice Calibrated on Scanner Data," originally published in 1983. This Classics Issue celebrates foundation research that is highly cited. Editorials from Editors-in-Chief along with author commentaries are included with the articles in this special issue.

John Little was honored by friends, colleagues, former students, and many others at a "John D. C. Little Festschrift Celebration," which took place June 6-7 at the 2009 INFORMS Marketing Science Conference held at the University of Michigan. A festschrift is a volume of papers written to honor an individual, which in Little's case, will eventually include about 20 papers and be published in 2010. Among John's achievements, he is famous for Little's Law in queuing, decision calculus models for marketing managers, his paper on marketing decision support systems, and his role in creating marketing science as a field. Other well-known research by John includes papers on choosing advertising media schedules, adaptive control of promotional spending, brand-size choice models calibrated on scanner panel data, and marketing mix models for consumer packaged goods.

John Little received the 2014 Sheth Foundation Medal for Exceptional Contribution to Marketing Scholarship and Practice. The award recognizes "enduring and transformational contributions" to both marketing scholarship and marketing practice. He received the award at an exclusive banquet during the annual INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, at Emory University in Atlanta. A special session followed, in which Professors John Hauser of MIT, Jim Lattin of Stanford, and John Roberts of the London Business School described Little's marketing accomplishments in detail.