Alexandre Jacquillat

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.

Alex Jacquillat has received two honors from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS): First, Jacquillat won the 2023 Transportation Science Paper of the Year Award from the INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Society, for “Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics Toward Passenger-Centric Ground Delay Programs.”

Second, Jacquillat won the INFORMS Computing Society Harvey J. Greenberg Research Award, which recognizes outstanding research in the area of computation and operations research applications, especially in emerging application fields. His winning paper, co-authored with Wei Zhang and Kai Wang (both at Tsinghua University) as well as Shuaian Wang (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), is entitled “Routing Optimization with Vehicle-Customer Coordination.”

Alexandre Jacquillat (Class of 1942 Career Development Assistant Professor; Assistant Professor of Operations Research/Statistics) and Andrew Sutherland (Ford International Career Development Associate Professor of Accounting) were each awarded the 2023 Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. 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. The Jamieson faculty prize is selected by a review committee at MIT.

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).

Alexandre Jacquillat has won a 2020 Teaching with Digital Technology Award from MIT for his work teaching on campus and/or remotely. Jacquillat won the award along with fellow Sloan faculty members Kara Blackburn, Vivek Farias, Michelle Hanlon, Miro Kazakoff, Ben Shields, and Rodrigo Verdi. These student-nominated awards recognize faculty and instructors who have used digital technology to improve teaching and learning for MIT students. This recognition also gives the MIT community the opportunity to learn from their innovative practices. The awards were co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor. This year, students submitted a total of 487 nominations for 232 faculty and instructors, and 30 winners were selected by Dean of Digital Learning Krishna Rajagopal and Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz, with help from MIT Open Learning staff.