Faculty

Sinan Aral, Jackson Lu, Hal Gregersen, Andy McAfee, and Geoff Parker have received Thinkers50 honors. Since 2001 Thinkers50 has recognized leading business and management ideas every two years with their Top 50 global rankings of the most influential business thinkers, emerging Radar ones to watch, and Distinguished Achievement Awards in specific management categories – “the Oscars of Management Thinking” (Financial Times). 

Sinan Aral, David Austin Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technology and Marketing as well as Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE), has won the 2021 Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award, which "celebrates the thinker who has done the most to convert the digital language of the 0 and 1 into useful human insights,” whose “research and insights shed the newest and most original light on the new digital reality.”

The top 50 honorees on the Thinkers50 2021 Ranking of Management Thinkers include:

Sinan Aral, who “forensically and persuasively gets to the reality inside social media and tech”;

Hal Gregersen, Senior Lecturer of Work and Organization Studies (WOS) and former Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center, a “catalytic questioner and global innovator, exploring how asking the right questions builds leadership and innovation, and drives purposeful change”;

Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist and Co-Director of the MIT IDE, who with Erik Brynjolfsson (former IDE Director) “launched into the thought leadership stratosphere in 2014 with The Second Machine Age”—“their work continues to provide a road-map for success in a digital economy”;  and

Geoff Parker, Visiting Scholar at the IDE, who with Marshall Van Alstyne (former Visiting Scholar at the IDE) “developed the concept of two-sided markets, which is used extensively in platform business models, and delivered the first comprehensive analysis of platform technology.”

In addition, each January Thinkers50 announces 30 emerging thinkers “with the potential to make lasting contributions to management theory and practice” to watch in the year ahead, and the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2021 included Jackson Lu, Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies.  The citation notes his being the first “to systematically research the ‘Bamboo Ceiling’ phenomenon” experienced by Asians in the United States, with “The Bamboo Ceiling: Why East Asians but Not South Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership Positions in the United States” (2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), co-authored with Richard Nesbitt (Univ. of Michigan) and Michael W. Morris (Columbia). 

Jackson Lu was also subsequently shortlisted for the Thinkers50 2021 RADAR Thinker Award—which recognizes the emerging scholar “most likely to shape the future of business and business thinking,” whose “work has the potential to challenge the way we think about management”—“for his impactful research on cross-cultural management and psychology, especially his research on the ‘Bamboo Ceiling’ faced by Asians.”

Nikos Trichakis won third place for the 2018 INFORMS TIMES (Technology, Innovation Management & Entrepreneurship Section) Best Working Paper Award, for “Blockchain and the Value of Operational Transparency for Supply Chain Finance,” co-authored with Jiri Chod (Boston College), Gerry Tsoukalas (Wharton), Henry Aspegren (MIT MEng grad; Tsinghua University), and Mark Weber (MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab).

Nikolaos Trichakis has won the 2020 INFORMS Koopman Prize. Along with co-authors David Simchi-Levi (MIT) and Peter Yun Zhang (Carnegie Mellon University), Trichakis was honored for the paper, “Designing Response Supply Chain Against Bioattacks.” The Koopman Prize is given for the outstanding publication in military operations research of the previous year.

Nikolaos Trichakis, Andrew Lo, Miro Kazakoff, Joseph Doyle, Kristin Forbes, Arathi Mehrotra, Adrien Verdelhan, and Sean Willems have each won a 2021 Teaching with Digital Technology Award from MIT for their work teaching on campus and/or remotely. 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 are co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor. This year students submitted a total of 230 nominations for 104 faculty and instructors, and 23 winners (35% from MIT Sloan) were selected by Dean for Digital Learning Krishna Rajagopal and Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz, in partnership with a panel of MIT students.  

Nikos Trichakis won the INFORMS 2018 MSOM (Manufacturing and Service Operations Management) iFORM (Interface of Finance, Operations, and Risk Management) SIG (Special Interest Group) Best Paper Award. His winning paper, co-authored with Dan A. Iancu (Stanford) and Gerry Tsoukalas (Wharton), is entitled, “Is Operating Flexibility Harmful Under Debt?” (Management Science, Vol. 63, No. 6 (June 2017): 1657-2048).

Catherine Tucker and Duncan Simester 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).

Catherine Tucker has won the 2018 INFORMS Society for Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award. This annual award recognizes a paper published in Marketing Science, Management Science, or another INFORMS journal that is regarded as having made a significant long-term impact on the field of marketing. Tucker’s winning paper, co-authored with Avi Goldfarb (University of Toronto), is entitled “Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness.”

Catherine Tucker has won the 2018 William F. O’Dell Award from the American Marketing Association. This annual award honors the Journal of Marketing Research article published five years ago (in 2013) that has made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice. Tucker’s winning paper, co-authored with Anja Lambrecht (London Business School), is entitled “When Does Retargeting Work? Information Specificity in Online Advertising” (Journal of Marketing Research, October 2013, 50:5, 561-576).

Catherine Tucker has won the TechSIG-Lazaridis Prize for Best Paper in Innovation, Technology and Interactivity for 2019.  Along with co-author Anja Lambrecht, Tucker was honored for the paper, “Algorithmic Bias? An Empirical Study of Apparent Gender-Based Discrimination in the Display of STEM Career Ads,” published in Management Science in 2019. 

Dimitris Bertsimas (Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management, Professor of Operations Research, and Associate Dean for Business Analytics) has received an honorary doctorate from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Athens, the largest and oldest university in Greece. This honor is particularly significant as it is only the 33^rd honorary doctorate given by the Department of Mathematics in its nearly 200-year history.

The degree was conferred on Bertsimas at the University of Athens in a ceremony in December 2021.