Faculty

Jackson Lu, General Motors Professor of Management and Professor of Work and Organization Studies, has recently won multiple awards for his research. 

First, Lu received the inaugural CARMA (Consortium for the Advancement of Research Methods & Analysis) Credible Management Research Award, which recognizes “rigorous and credible scientific work in the management and organizational sciences,” from among empirical papers published in the prior two calendar years. His winning paper, “Breaking Ceilings: Debate Training Promotes Leadership Emergence by Increasing Assertiveness” (published last year in Journal of Applied Psychology, 110(9), 1225-1239), is co-authored with Michelle X. Zhao (Washington University in St. Louis), Hui Liao (University of Maryland), and Lu Doris Zhang (MIT Sloan PhD student). The comments about the paper include that the authors make "meaningful contributions to both theory (leader emergence) and practice (debate training and assertiveness) … The reporting … could easily serve as an aspirational goal for researchers who promote open science practices.” 

Second, this paper was also a runner-up for the 2026 Best Published Paper Award from the Academy of Management Careers Division. This award honors outstanding research in the field of careers studies that “significantly contributes to advancing careers research by introducing innovative ideas, challenging established theories, and/or employing novel data or methodologies.” 

Third, Lu's working paper titled “How and When National Diversity Stimulates Entrepreneurial Entry: Evidence from Two Large-Scale, Time-Lagged Quasi-Experiments” was a finalist for the 2026 Best Faculty-Led Paper Award in Entrepreneurial Cognition from the AOM Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division.  

These honors were announced at the AOM 2026 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia in July and August.

Catherine Tucker (Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and Professor of Marketing) has won the Donald G. Morrison Long-Term Impact Award from the INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Society for Marketing Science (ISMS). This award is given annually to a marketing paper published in an INFORMS journal “that is viewed to have made a significant long-run impact on the field of Marketing.”

Tucker’s winning 2019 paper, co-authored with Anja Lambrecht (London Business School), is titled “Algorithmic Bias? An Empirical Study of Apparent Gender-Based Discrimination in the Display of STEM Career Ads” (Management Science 65(7):2966-2981).

Stuart Madnick, the John Norris Maguire (1960) Professor of Information Technology, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the 2026 Chief Data Officer and Information Quality (CDOIQ) Symposium. The citation honors Madnick’s “visionary leadership, pioneering contribution, and lifelong dedication to advancing information quality, data management, and the global data leadership community.”

The award was presented in July 2026 at the 20th Annual CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Mass. A post from Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS, where Madnick is founding director) has more information and photos from the event.

Mary Rowe (adjunct professor of Work and Organization Studies and former MIT organizational ombuds for over four decades) has won the 2026 Trailblazer Award from the International Ombuds Association (IOA). This award is the IOA’s highest honor, recognizing significant contributions to the organizational ombuds field over an extended period of time. Rowe was recognized “for her work as a pioneer and one of the most influential ombuds in the profession.”

The award was announced and presented in April at the 2026 IOA Annual Conference. The announcement has more information on Rowe’s “pioneering contributions,” including authoring “MIT’s widely adopted Guide to Dealing with Harassment.” The IOA president commented on her “tremendous impact”: “She has revolutionized how ombuds manage and respond to the politics and problems that arise on campuses, and her lifelong contributions to the profession and IOA are unmatched.” 

Additional information is in this MIT article.

Ziv Epstein (postdoctoral associate; MIT Media Arts and Sciences PhD ’23), Jackson G. Lu (General Motors Professor of Management and professor of Work and Organization Studies), David G. Rand (visiting professor of Marketing; Cornell University), and Michael Stagnaro (research scientist) have won the 2026 Best Publication Award for Innovation in Behavioral Policy from the Behavioral Science & Policy Association (BSPA).

This year’s award recognizes research published 2022-2025 “that advances the rigorous application and development of behavioral/social science to policy and practice in public, private and nonprofit sectors … to encourage work that has potential to improve the quality of life of individuals and/or organizations.”

Their winning paper, titled “Understanding and Combatting Misinformation Across 16 Countries on Six Continents” (Nature Human Behaviour 7, 1502-1513, 2023), is co-authored with Antonio Arechar (CIDE—Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, Mexico), Jennifer Allen (New York University Stern; MIT Sloan Marketing PhD ’24), Adam Berinsky (MIT Political Science), Rocky Cole (iVerify), Kiran Garimella (Rutgers), Andrew Gully (Microsoft), Gordon Pennycook (Cornell University), Robert M. Ross (Macquarie University), and Yunhao (Jerry) Zhang (Psychology of Technology Institute; MIT Sloan PhD ’23).

The paper focuses on misinformation about COVID-19, with nearly 35,000 participants in global experiments that validate major findings from previous work focused on the U.S. factors that predict susceptibility to misinformation, as well as effectiveness of interventions to help, are found to be similar across the world. A Cornell news article has more information.

The award was announced Cambridge at the BSPA 2026 Conference in June.

Kerry Siani (Class of 1958 Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Finance) has won the award for 2026 Best Empirical Finance Paper (the Wharton School – WRDS [Wharton Research Data Services] Award) from the Western Finance Association (WFA).

Siani’s winning working paper, co-authored with Julia Selgrad (the University of Chicago Booth School of Business), is titled “Monetary Policy and Investment Plans.”

The award was presented in June in Denver at the 2026 WFA meeting.

Taha Choukhmane (Albert F. (1942) & Jeanne P. Clear Career Development Assistant Professor in Global Management and Assistant Professor of Finance), Weidong (Weldon) Lin (MIT Sloan Finance PhD student), and Matthew Akuzawa (MIT Sloan Finance predoctoral researcher) have won the 2026 Outstanding Paper Award from the Swiss Finance Institute (SFI). This award recognizes an unpublished research paper that is expected to make an outstanding contribution to the field of finance.

Their winning paper, co-authored with Tim DeSilva (Stanford; MIT Sloan Finance PhD ‘24), is titled “AI Financial Advice: Supply, Demand, and Life Cycle Implications.” A press release about the paper’s research was posted recently.

The award was announced in June, noting that their paper shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) "can improve financial decision-making by providing scalable, low-cost advice, although differences in user characteristics and prompts can lead to unequal wealth outcomes." The paper’s key findings will be presented in June 2027 at the SFI Research Days in Gerzensee, Switzerland.

S.P. Kothari (Gordon Y Billard Professor of Accounting and Finance, Emeritus) has received the American Accounting Association (AAA) 2026 Outstanding Accounting Educator Award. This honor recognizes "educators with sustained contributions that have significantly impacted accounting education or accounting educators, and whose career contributions include educational innovation, excellence in teaching, publications related to the awards’ intent, research guidance and mentorship to students … and impactful service to the profession and/or academic community." Recipients "excel across multiple criteria" of the award, which is sponsored by the PwC US Group LLP.

The award was announced in May 2026 and will be presented during the 2026 AAA Global Connect (formerly the Annual Meeting) in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Catherine Wolfram (William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy and Professor of Applied Economics) has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for 2026, recognizing her “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.”

Established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the NAS is a private, nonprofit institution that recognizes achievement in science by election to membership.  Along with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine, it provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

The new NAS members from MIT were announced and profiled in a recent MIT News article.
 

Kerry Siani (Class of 1958 Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Finance) has won the 2026 North America Best Paper in Corporate Finance from the Society for Financial Studies (SFS), for the second year in a row. This year, the award was sponsored by Wharton Research Data Services.

Siani’s winning working paper, co-authored with Julia Selgrad (University of Chicago Booth School of Business), is titled “Monetary Policy and Investment Plans.”

The award was presented  in Charlottesville, Virginia, at SFS Cavalcade North America 2026, an annual conference that covers all areas of finance and is a joint project of the Review of Financial Studies, Review of Corporate Finance Studies, and Review of Asset Pricing Studies.