Dimitris Bertsimas

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) has received the 2025-26 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, the highest honor given by the MIT faculty to its own professors, to recognize “extraordinary professional achievement.”

The Killian Award citation notes that his “scholarly contributions are both vast and groundbreaking" and that Bertsimas, “through his remarkable intellectual breadth and accomplishments, incredible productivity, outstanding contributions to theory and practice, and educational leadership, has made enormous contributions to his profession, the Institute, and the world."

As is tradition, Bertsimas will deliver the Killian Award Lecture in the spring of 2026 to share about his work with the MIT community.

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.

Nikos Trichakis has received four honors from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), including one shared with Dimitris Bertsimas:

First, Trichakis won the 2023 Sanjay and Panna Mehrotra Research Excellence Award from the INFORMS Health Applications Society. This award recognizes a mid-career researcher for significant contributions to the practice of health applications through operations research and management science modeling and methodologies. This honor is specifically in recognition of Trichakis’s body of theoretical and practical work on affecting the national transplantation policy in the United States.

He also had 3 other paper honors:

Trichakis, along with MIT Sloan colleague Dimitris Bertsimas, was runner-up for the 2023 INFORMS Pierskalla Best Paper Award, which recognizes research excellence in the field of health care management science. The honored paper, co-authored with Bertsimas, Theodore Papalexopoulos (2022 MIT PhD in Operations Research), Darren Stewart (NYU Langone Health), and James Alcorn and Rebecca Goff (both of United Network for Organ Sharing), is entitled “Reshaping National Organ Allocation Policy.”

Trichakis also was a finalist for the 2023 Management Science Best Paper Award in Operations Management, which recognizes outstanding contributions to operations management among all operations papers published in Management Science over the past three years. “On the Financing Benefits of Supply Chain Transparency and Blockchain Adoption,” co-authored with Jiri Chod (Boston College), Gerry Tsoukalas (University of Pennsylvania; Boston University), Henry Aspegren (Meta; 2018 MIT MEng), and Mark Weber (IBM Research; MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab), was a finalist for this award the past two years in a row.

Finally, Trichakis was a finalist for the 2023 MSOM (Manufacturing and Service Operations Management section of INFORMS) iFORM (Interface of Finance, Operations, and Risk Management) Special Interest Group Best Paper award, which considers publications in all INFORMS journals in the prior three years, for “Platform Tokenization: Financing, Governance, and Moral Hazard” (Management Science), co-authored with Jiri Chod (Boston College) and S. Alex Yang (London Business School).

Dimitris Bertsimas and Alex Jacquillat have won the 2020 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.

Their winning paper, “From predictions to prescriptions: A data-driven response to COVID-19,” was co-authored with Léonard Boussioux, Ryan Cory-Wright, Arthur Delarue, Vassilis Digalakis Jr., Driss Lahlou Kitane, Michael Li, Agni Orfanoudaki, Theodore Papalexopoulos, Ivan Paskov, Kimberly Villalobos Carballo, Holly Wiberg, and Cynthia Zeng (all MIT Operations Research Center PhD students advised by Bertsimas); Omar Skali Lami (ORC PhD student advised by Bertsimas and Georgia Perakis); Galit Lukin (Datadog, ORC SM ’20, advised by Bertsimas); Jean Pauphilet (London Business School, ORC PhD ’20, advised by Bertsimas); Luca Mingardi (Interpretable AI, MIT Sloan MBAn ’20, advised by Bertsimas); Hamza Tazi Bouardi (BCG GAMMA, MIT Sloan MBAn ’20, advised by Bertsimas); and two of Bertsimas’s former postdocs, Omid Nohadani (Northwestern) and Bartolomeo Stellato (Princeton).

Dimitris Bertsimas has received the 2016 Harold Larnder Prize, an annual award recognizing an individual who has achieved international distinction in operational research, from the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS). He delivered the Harold Larnder Memorial Lecture at the 58th Annual CORS Conference, at the Banff Centre in Canada, on May 30, 2016.

Dimitris Bertsimas has won two major awards from INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). First, Bertsimas won the 2019 John von Neumann Theory Prize for his having made fundamental, sustained contributions to theory in operations research and the management sciences. The award’s criteria are broad and include significance, innovation, depth, and scientific excellence. The prize recognizes his body of work’s contributions that have stood the test of time.

Bertsimas also won the 2019 INFORMS President’s Award, recognizing important contributions to the welfare of society.

Dimitris Bertsimas’s teaching has been included in the "Class Central's Top 50 MOOCS of All Time” (2017 edition) list, based on thousands of reviews by Class Central users. MOOCs are Massive Open Online Courses, free to anyone with an internet connection. Class Central reports there are now over 8,000 MOOCs offered by around 750 universities worldwide. Bertsimas’s course 15.071x The Analytics Edge, delivered via edX, was one of four MIT courses  in the “Top 50 MOOCS of All Time” list. The award was announced last month in a Class Central blog post.

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.

Dimitris Bertsimas was awarded the 2008 Farkas Prize of the INFORMS Optimization Society, for his research work on robust optimization and its applications. The Farkas Prize is awarded bi-annually by INFORMS for the most significant contribution to the field of optimization by a researcher.

Dimitris Bertsimas has been named the 2016 IFORS Distinguished Lecturer by the International Federation of Operational Research Societies.  He delivered this lecture at the 28th European Conference on Operational Research, at the Poznan University of Technology in Poland, on July 4, 2016.

Dimitris Bertsimas and Otto Scharmer were each awarded the 2015 Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching, established to honor educational innovation and excellence. The Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching Award is the most prestigious teaching prize offered by the School. The award was established in 2006 and is awarded each year to two MIT Sloan faculty members, as well as two electrical engineering and computer science faculty members, for their contributions to educational excellence at MIT.

Dimitris Bertsimas and a team he led with MIT students and researchers from Janssen Research & Development, who developed the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, has received the 2021 Innovative Applications in Analytics Award (First Place) from INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). The award, sponsored by the Analytics Society of INFORMS, Kinaxis, and Adelphi University, recognizes the creative and unique application of a combination of analytical techniques in a new area.

In their winning application, entitled “Data-driven COVID-19 Vaccine Development for Janssen,” Bertsimas’s team guided Johnson & Johnson on where to perform the clinical trials for its COVID-19 vaccine. The team also included Michael Lingzhi Li (MIT PhD student advised by Bertsimas) and Omar Skali Lami (MIT PhD student advised by both Bertsimas and Georgia Perakis); Hamza Tazi Bouardi (BCG GAMMA; MIT MBAn ’20, formerly advised by Bertsimas); Ali Haddad-Sisakht (Dynamic Ideas, LLC); and Najat Khan, Jennings Xu, Jose Zamalloa, Amir Hashemi, Ankit Lodha, Yuqi Shang, Kris Standish, Shi-hua Yu, Levon Demirdjian, Xiaoying Wu, and Sid Jain (all from Janssen Pharmaceuticals).

The award was announced at the Virtual 2021 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference. More details can be found in this MIT News article.