Faculty

John Horton, the Richard S. Leghorn (1939) Career Development Associate Professor and Associate Professor of Information Technology, has won two awards.

First, Horton is a winner of the 2021 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) ISS Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award, which recognizes “early career individuals who are on a path towards making outstanding intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline.” 

Second, Horton won the AI/ML Rising Star Award at the 2021 Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Business Analytics, where he was also a keynote speaker. 

Cynthia Barnhart (Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering, Professor of Operations Research, and former Chancellor of MIT) has won the INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) 2021 George E. Kimball Medal, which recognizes distinguished service to INFORMS and to the profession of operations research and the management sciences. 

The detailed award citation describes Barnhart’s career contributions and recognizes her “distinguished service to INFORMS and her wide-ranging contributions to the profession of operations research through research, practice, education, leadership, and service.”

Haihao Lu was honored with the INFORMS Optimization Society Young Researcher Prize while he was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

This prize serves as an esteemed recognition of promising colleagues in the field of optimization who are at the beginning of their academic or industrial career. The winning material is a solo-authored paper, entitled “An O(s^r)-Resolution ODE Framework for Understanding Discrete-Time Algorithms and Applications to the Linear Convergence of Minimax Problems.” The citation of the prize reads, “There has been renewed interest in using ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to understand the dynamics of a discrete-time optimization algorithm (DTA), due to the ease of analysis of ODEs compared to that of a DTA. However, two fundamental open questions have limited the applications of the ODE approach in optimization algorithm analysis: 1) how to obtain a suitable ODE from an optimization method? 2) what is the connection between the convergence of the ODE and the convergence of the optimization method? Haihao Lu’s paper constructively answers the first question by proposing a hierarchy of O(s^r)-resolution ODEs, parameterized by the order r, that converges to the discrete-time optimization method as r goes to infinity, where s is the step-size of the algorithm. Furthermore, the paper addresses the second question by showing that with a properly chosen energy function in the analysis, the linear convergence of the ODE automatically guarantees the linear convergence of the corresponding optimization method. Finally, the paper answers fundamental questions about three central algorithms for minimax problems and their convergent/divergent behavior. In summary, the novel and unified framework developed in this paper for analyzing a broad class of optimization algorithms makes it highly deserving of the INFORMS Optimization Society Young Researcher Prize.”

David Gamarnik, Nanyang Technological University Professor of Operations Research, has recently received two fellow honors.

First, Gamarnik has been elected as an INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Fellow, Class of 2021. This honor recognizes “outstanding lifetime accomplishments and contributions in operations research and analytics.” Gamarnik was honored in particular “for fundamental contributions to the analysis of complex stochastic networks and the understanding of stochastic phenomena.” The 2021 INFORMS Fellows were announced in October 2021.

Second, Gamarnik has been selected for the 2022 Class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), in recognition of his outstanding contributions to mathematics and to the profession. Gamarnik was particularly cited for his “contributions to discrete probability and its applications to graph theory, statistical physics and the theory of algorithms.” The AMS Fellows were announced online recently.

Jackson Lu has recently received four honors for three different papers.

First, Lu won the 2021 Phillips and Nadkarni Award for Outstanding Paper on Diversity and Cognition from the Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division of the Academy of Management (AOM). Lu’s sole-authored winning paper is entitled “Cultural Diversity Stimulates Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Two Large-Scale Natural Experiments”.
Worth noting, is the distinction that two of the five finalist papers were Lu’s, and the one above won: Lu also was a finalist for this same award with a different sole-authored paper entitled “The Bamboo Ceiling: A Network Perspective on Why East Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership”.

The second paper above was also honored with a nomination for the AOM’s Carolyn B. Dexter Award, an academy-wide honor for the paper that “best meets the objective of internationalizing the Academy of Management.” 

Finally, Lu was a finalist for the 2021 Responsible Research in Management Award, selected by AOM Fellows and co-sponsored by Responsible Research in Business and Management to recognize recent research that “benefits society by producing credible and useful knowledge.” Lu’s finalist paper, entitled “The Bamboo Ceiling: Why East Asians but Not South Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership Positions in the United States” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mar 2020, 117(9), 4590-4600), was co-authored with Richard E. Nisbett (University of Michigan) and Michael W. Morris (Columbia University).

Nathan Wilmers has won the 2021 ASQ Dissertation Award, which recognizes a paper published in Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) in the previous year that was based on a dissertation and best exemplifies the criteria for publication in ASQ, combining significant theoretical advances with extensive data collection and rigorous analysis. Wilmers’ sole-authored winning paper, published in ASQ in 2020, is entitled “Job Turf or Variety:  Task Structure as a Source of Organizational Inequality.”

The award, usually announced in person during the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, (due to the pandemic) was announced recently in an ASQ letter from the Editor, which states that Wilmers’ “novel paper reveals the importance of the job itself—and the task structure within the job—to explain pay inequalities.” The award committee noted that Wilmers identifies “a really intriguing research question, develops novel theory to explain it, and writes with the requisite clarity for those not doing research on labor markets to read, understand, and appreciate.”

Wanda Orlikowski has been elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy, the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences, as a Corresponding (non-UK) Fellow in Management and Business Studies (MBS). This is the highest honor that the Academy confers on non-UK residents, in recognition of Orlikowksi’s scholarly distinction in and her outstanding contributions to the social sciences and humanities. Founded in 1902, the British Academy aims to inspire, support, and promote outstanding achievement and global advances in the humanities and social sciences, as a Fellowship, funding body, and forum for debate and engagement.

Erin Kelly has won the 2021 Max Weber Book Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the American Sociological Association Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work.

Her winning book, “Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do About It” (Princeton University Press, 2020), co-authored with Phyllis Moen (University of Minnesota), was recognized among books published within the last three years (2018-2020) for its “outstanding contribution to scholarship on organizations, occupations, and/or work.”

Stuart Madnick, co-director and co-founder of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS), and Angelica Marotta (CAMS and National Research Council of Italy) have won the 2021 Best Paper Award from the International Association for Computer Information Systems (IACIS) Europe Conference. Their winning paper, recognized for significant contributions to information systems and related fields, is entitled “Convergence and Divergence of Regulatory Compliance and Cybersecurity.”

Jónas Oddur Jónasson has won the INFORMS Institute for Operations Research and the Management Science (INFORMS) 2020/21 M&SOM (Manufacturing & Service Operations Management) Practice-Based Research Competition, which recognizes outstanding unpublished Operations Management research papers with a high potential or realized impact on practice.

Jónasson’s winning paper, “Redesigning Sample Transportation in Malawi Through Improved Data Sharing and Daily Route Optimization,” was co-authored with Emma Gibson (MIT ORC PhD student), Sarang Deo (Indian School of Business), Mphatso Kachule (Riders for Health Malawi), and Kara Palamountain (Kellogg School of Management).