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.”

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.”

Jackson G. Lu, Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies (WOS), has won the 2021 Academy of Management (AOM) Network of Leadership Scholars (NLS) Rising Star Early Career Award, sponsored by the Exeter Centre for Leadership. This award recognizes Lu’s significant contributions to the field of leadership research through his core research stream on the Bamboo Ceiling experienced by Asians in the United States.

Two published papers in Jackson’s winning stream of research are: 

1) “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 (University of Michigan) and Michael W. Morris (Columbia University); and

2) his sole-authored “A Social Network Perspective on the Bamboo Ceiling: Ethnic Homophily Explains Why East Asians but Not South Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership in Multiethnic Environments” (forthcoming, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology).

The award was announced recently. Lu will be presented with the award in a ceremony at the 2022 AOM Conference in Seattle.

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.