Faculty

Vivek Farias (Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor and Professor of Operations Management), Jónas Oddur Jónasson (Robert G. James Career Development Associate Professor in Operations Management), and Erez Yoeli (research scientist) have won the 2024 Pierskalla Best Paper Award from the Health Applications Society of INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). This award recognizes research excellence in the field of health care management science.

The team’s winning paper, “Policy Optimization for Personalized Interventions in Behavioral Health,” was co-authored with Jackie Baek (MIT PhD ‘22 in Operations Research; New York University-Stern) and Justin Boutilier (University of Ottawa).

The award was announced at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in October 2024 in Seattle. 

Maryam Farboodi, the Jon D. Gruber Career Development Associate Professor and an associate professor of Finance has won 2024 Elaine Bennett Research Prize.

The Elaine Bennett Research Prize was established in 1998, and recognizes and honors outstanding research in any field of economics by a woman not more than 10 years beyond her PhD. The prize is supported by contributions from William Zame and others,  in memory of Elaine Bennett, who made significant contributions in economic theory and experimental economics and encouraged the work of young women in all areas of economics.

In the award citation, Farboodi is recognized for making several significant contributions to the understanding of how economic growth interacts with the evolving role of big data in the financial sector. For example, her influential paper with Laura Veldkamp, “Long-Run Growth of Financial Data Technology,” published in the American Economic Review, demonstrates how improvement in big data technologies influences market dynamics and investor behavior.

See the American Economic Association website for more details on the award.

Jackson Lu, Sloan School Career Development Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies, has won the Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize, a 2024 Outstanding Single Contribution Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). This prize recognizes “the author of an article or book chapter judged to provide the most innovative theoretical contribution to social/personality psychology” in the prior year, honoring both “conceptual innovation and potential to motivate new research and further conceptual investigation” to advance the field.

Lu’s winning paper, “A Socioecological-Genetic Framework of Culture and Personality: Their Roots, Trends, and Interplay” (Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 74:363-390, 2023), was co-authored with MIT Sloan Organization Studies PhD student Laura Changlan Wang and Verónica Benet-Martínez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra).

The award was announced in October, and will be presented during an awards ceremony at the SPSP Annual Convention February 2025 in Denver.

Dimitris Bertsimas (MIT Vice Provost for Open Learning and at MIT Sloan, Associate Dean for Business Analytics; Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management, and Professor of Operations Research) and Alex Jacquillat (Maurice F. Strong Career Development Associate Professor and Associate Professor of Operations Research and Statistics) have won the 2023 Harold W. Kuhn Award from Naval Research Logistics. This honor recognizes the best paper published in the journal during the prior three years (2020-2022).

Bertsimas’s and Jacquillat’s winning paper, “Where to Locate COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Facilities?” (Naval Research Logistics, 69(2), 179-200, 2022; first published online June 2021), was co-authored with Bertsimas’s former students: Vassilis Digalakis Jr. (MIT PhD in Operations Research ’23; HEC Paris), Michael Lingzhi Li (MBAn ’18; MIT PhD in Operations Research ’22; HBS), and Alessandro Previero (MBAn ’20; MultiPlan).

The citation commends the paper’s “integration of an epidemiological model with an optimization model to support the strategic location of COVID-19 mass vaccination sites,” with “a scalable algorithm for efficiently computing solutions,” demonstrating, “through numerical experiments … carefully calibrated with real-world data, that optimized site locations can reduce mortality by 20%, saving 4,000 additional lives over three months and ensuring equitable distribution across states.”

The award was announced in September 2024.

Steve Eppinger, General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management and Professor of Management Science and Innovation, was chosen to deliver the 2024 OMEGA RHO Distinguished Lecture on Operations Research and Management Science, a lecture series presented as a plenary at ORSA/TIMS (Operations Research Society of America/The Institute of Management Sciences) and INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Meetings. This award is sponsored by the Omega Rho Honor Society, which promotes and recognizes superior scholarship and leadership in operations research and management science (and formally became part of INFORMS in 1998). Eppinger is the sixth MIT faculty member to receive this honor over the past four decades.

Eppinger presented his lecture, titled "Adventures in Engineering Management," as a keynote at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in October 2024 in Seattle. 

Emil Verner, Albert F. (1942) & Jeanne P. Clear Career Development Associate Professor in Global Management and Associate Professor of Finance, is a recipient of the Excellence Awards in Global Economic Affairs 2024 from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. These awards recognize outstanding young economists in order “to build a community of the brightest young researchers in the area of global economic affairs.”

The citation recognizes Verner’s “significant contributions to the field of Macro-finance and International Economics”; “Verner’s outstanding research contributed to a better understanding of past recessions and crises to help prevent future economic crises.”

The award was announced in October 2024 and the awards ceremony was held during the 3^rd Kiel-CEPR (Centre for Economic Policy Research) Conference on Geoeconomics in Berlin, Germany.

Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu and MIT Sloan professor Simon Johnson, PhD ’89, as well as James A. Robinson from the University of Chicago, have won the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited their “studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” 

The trio’s research shows why "societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better."

Johnson and Acemoglu are co-authors of the 2023 book "Power and Progress: Our 1,000-Year Struggle over Technology & Prosperity."

Read more at MIT News. Learn more about their research in Ideas Made to Matter.

Jackson Lu, Sloan School Career Development Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies,  recently received five honors:

First, Lu is a recipient of the Early Career Achievement Award from the Human Resources (HR) Division of the Academy of Management (AOM),  which honors distinguished contributions of HR scholars during their early- to mid-career stage (within 7 years of receiving their PhD) and which recognizes Lu's research stream on the Bamboo Ceiling. The AOM HR Division Chair said: “The award acknowledges Professor Lu’s clear record of excellence in research and the promise that his impact will continue to have on the science, teaching, and practice of human resource management. This is the most prestigious early career award granted by the HR Division of the Academy of Management. Professor Lu is a true rising star within the HR research community."

Second, a paper regarding the Bamboo Ceiling in starting salaries  (“Asians Don’t Ask? Relational Concerns, Negotiation Propensity, and Starting Salaries,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 108(2), 273-290) was runner-up for the Best Published Paper Award (for papers published in the past year) from the Careers Division of the AOM.

Third, Lu received the AOM IM (International Management) Division Florida International University Business Emerging Scholar Award for outstanding contributions to international management scholarship by a junior scholar (within 8 years of PhD).  This award recognizes Lu’s research stream on how multicultural experiences (e.g., working abroad) shape key organizational outcomes.

Fourth, Lu is also a winner of the 2024 “Responsible Research in Management” Award sponsored by the AOM Fellows (co-sponsored by the Community for Responsible Research in Business and Management), which honors “significant contributions to the science and practice of management” with “recent research that benefits society by producing credible and useful knowledge” that informs policy and influences practice.  Lu’s winning paper is entitled, “Global Leaders for Global Teams: Leaders with Multicultural Experiences Communicate and Lead More Effectively, Especially in Multinational Teams” (Organization Science, 33(4), 1554-1573).

The honors above were announced in September at the Chicago at the Annual Meeting of the AOM.

Additionally, the paper above, ("Global Leaders for Global Teams: Leaders with Multicultural Experiences Communicate and Lead More Effectively, Especially in Multinational Teams”) also won the 2024 Outstanding Empirical Paper Award from the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM).  This award was presented at the IACM Annual Conference in June in Singapore.
 

Tom Malone, Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technology, has received the Roosevelt “Rosey” Thompson Award from the U.S. Presidential Scholars Foundation. This award honors “exceptional Presidential Scholars alumni who embody … outstanding qualities of civil service” and whose “significant contributions have enriched our society”:  “An organizational theorist, Malone anticipated developments at the interface of business and information technology that surround us today. He has co-founded three software companies, published six books, and received 11 patents for inventions.”

The award was presented in June at a ceremony during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Scholars 60th Anniversary Celebration in Washington, D.C.

Negin Golrezaei, W. Maurice Young (1961) Career Development Associate Professor of Management and Associate Professor of Operations Management, has won a Distinguished Paper Award recognizing three of the best papers presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2024. 

Golrezaei’s winning paper, “Online Combinatorial Optimization with Group Fairness Constraints” (Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence), was co-authored with Rad Niazadeh (Chicago Booth School of Business), Kumar Kshitij Patel (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago), and Fransisca Susan (Two Sigma; 2023 MIT PhD in Operations Research).