Faculty

Emil Verner (Albert F. (1942) & Jeanne P. Clear Career Development Associate Professor in Global Management and Associate Professor of Finance) has received a 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which is “dedicated to improving the welfare of all through the advancement of scientific knowledge.” This honor recognizes outstanding creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments; the achievements and potential of awarded Sloan Research Fellows “place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada.”

Verner is one of seven MIT faculty members among the 126 Sloan Research Fellows chosen this year from over 1,000 nominations of early-career scholars by fellow scientists across seven fields—chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics (Verner’s awarded area), mathematics, neuroscience, and physics.

Lawrence (Larry) D.W. Schmidt—Victor J. Menezes (1972) Career Development Assistant Professor of Finance—has won the 2024 Dimensional Fund Advisors Prize (First Prize), for the top paper published in The Journal of Finance in any area other than corporate finance (in the December 2023 issue and first five issues of 2024). This annual prize is given by the American Finance Association (publishers of The Journal of Finance) and sponsored by Dimensional Fund Advisors (prizes prior to 2019 were sponsored by Amundi Pioneer, Amundi Smith Breeden, and Smith Breeden, and named accordingly).

Schmidt’s winning paper, “Selling Fast and Buying Slow: Heuristics and Trading Performance of Institutional Investors,” was co-authored with Klakow Akepanidtaworn (International Monetary Fund), Rick Di Mascio (Inalytics), and Alex Imas (Chicago Booth) and published in the December 2023 issue of The Journal of Finance, 78(6), 3055-3098.

The award was announced online and presented at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association in January 2025 in San Francisco.

Jonathan Parker (Robert C. Merton (1970) Professor of Financial Economics and Professor of Finance) and Antoinette Schoar (Stewart C. Myers-Horn Family Professor of Finance) have won the 2024 TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security from the TIAA Institute.

Their winning paper, co-authored with Yang Sun (Brandeis University), is titled “Retail Financial Innovation and Stock Market Dynamics: The Case of Target Date Funds” (The Journal of Finance, Vol. 78, No. 5, October 2023). The paper shows that Target Date Fund (TDF) trading activity (with a strategy to sell stocks when the market does well and buy when it does poorly) helps stabilize stock prices and may dampen overall market volatility. “While earlier research has focused on benefits [of Target Date Fund (TDF) holdings within retirement plans] to individual investors, the authors advance the literature by analyzing TDFs’ effects on asset markets. The results are relevant for academics, practitioners and policymakers alike” (Jonathan Reuter, Boston College—an award judge).

The award was announced and presented earlier in January 2025 at the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) in San Francisco.

Stuart Madnick (John Norris Maguire (1960) Professor of Information Technology and co-director and co-founder of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan—CAMS), Michael Coden (CAMS associate director, co-founder, and research affiliate; Boston Consulting Group), and Jeffrey Proudfoot (CAMS research affiliate; Bentley University) have won a 2024 Association for Information Systems (AIS) Best Information Systems Publications Award, which recognizes outstanding papers deemed by AIS senior scholars to be the top five published in 2023 across a range of journals in the information systems field.

Their winning paper, “The Importance of Board Member Actions for Cybersecurity Governance and Risk Management,” was co-authored with W. Alec Cram (University of Waterloo) and published in December 2023 in MIS Quarterly Executive (MISQE, Vol. 22: Issue 4, Article 6).

The award was presented December 16, 2024 at the International Conference on Information Systems in Bangkok, Thailand.

Arnie Barnett (George Eastman Professor of Management Science and Professor of Statistics) and Mohammad Fazel-Zarandi (Senior Lecturer in Operations Management and Research Scientist) have won the Risk Analysis journal’s 2024 Best Paper Award, recognizing the paper with "the most significant impacts to the theory or practice of risk analysis” from among the journal’s 2024 publications (volume 44).

Their winning paper is titled “Why Did US Urban Homicide Spike in 2020? A Cross-Sectional Data Analysis for the Largest American Cities” (Risk Analysis, 44(7), 1616-1629, 2024).

The award was presented in December at the 2024 Society for Risk Analysis annual meeting in Austin, Texas.

Haihao Lu, assistant professor of Operations Research and Statistics, has won the 2024 COIN-OR (COmputational INfrastructure for Operations Research) Cup for his work (joint with Jinwen Yang, a University of Chicago PhD student in Statistics) on the software cuPDLP.jl. This award “recognizes and celebrates the best contributions to open-source operations research software development and use associated with the COIN-OR software collection.”

The award citation notes the winning project’s “great novelty by leveraging an underexplored first-order method for linear programming” and its “traction in the optimization community, with several solvers already integrating it ... cuPDLP actively adopts GPU acceleration techniques, which open the door for significant advancements in computational efficiency,” and its “exceptional contributions ... have advanced the computational infrastructure for linear programming.”

The award was announced and celebrated in October 2024, during the INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) annual meeting in Seattle.

Juanjuan Zhang, John D.C. Little Professor of Marketing, has won the INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) 2023-2024 Gary L. Lilien ISMS-MSI (Marketing Science Institute)-EMAC (European Marketing Academy) Practice Prize. This honor is awarded every other year for an outstanding implementation of marketing science with significant practical and demonstrated organizational impact.

Zhang’s winning project, “Sales Automation,“ co-authored with Saiquan Hu (Hunan University; former MIT Sloan postdoc) and Yuting Zhu (National University of Singapore; MIT Sloan PhD 2022), is based on their paper titled “Beyond Zero: Jump-Starting Sales With a Recommender System for Missing-By-Choice Data.”

The award was announced in June at the 2024 annual ISMS Marketing Science Conference in Sydney, Australia, and a Practice Prize Report with a discussion of the 2024 competition, including links to finalist presentations, was published in November of 2024.

Rahul Bhui, Class of 1958 Career Development Assistant Professor and assistant professor of Marketing, has received the 2024 Early Career Award from the Society for NeuroEconomics (SNE). This award recognizes early-career scholars (within 10 years of receiving their PhD) for outstanding contributions to the field of Neuroeconomics, related to “understanding the neural basis of decision making or the impact of this knowledge on formal understanding of decision behavior.”

The award announcement notes that Bhui “develops and tests computational models that capture the mental algorithms behind our decisions … to reveal the unifying principles that underlie both rationality and irrationality, and to investigate their implications for management and policy.”

The award was presented in October at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the SNE in Cascais, Portugal.

Vivek Farias (Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor and Professor of Operations Management), Jónas Oddur Jónasson (Robert G. James Career Development Associate Professor in Operations Management), and Erez Yoeli (research scientist) have won the 2024 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.

The team’s winning paper, “Policy Optimization for Personalized Interventions in Behavioral Health,” was co-authored with Jackie Baek (MIT PhD ‘22 in Operations Research; New York University-Stern) and Justin Boutilier (University of Ottawa).

The award was announced at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in October 2024 in Seattle. 

Maryam Farboodi, the Jon D. Gruber Career Development Associate Professor and an associate professor of Finance has won 2024 Elaine Bennett Research Prize.

The Elaine Bennett Research Prize was established in 1998, and recognizes and honors outstanding research in any field of economics by a woman not more than 10 years beyond her PhD. The prize is supported by contributions from William Zame and others,  in memory of Elaine Bennett, who made significant contributions in economic theory and experimental economics and encouraged the work of young women in all areas of economics.

In the award citation, Farboodi is recognized for making several significant contributions to the understanding of how economic growth interacts with the evolving role of big data in the financial sector. For example, her influential paper with Laura Veldkamp, “Long-Run Growth of Financial Data Technology,” published in the American Economic Review, demonstrates how improvement in big data technologies influences market dynamics and investor behavior.

See the American Economic Association website for more details on the award.