Faculty

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.

Jackson Lu, Sloan School Career Development Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies, has won the Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize, a 2024 Outstanding Single Contribution Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). This prize recognizes “the author of an article or book chapter judged to provide the most innovative theoretical contribution to social/personality psychology” in the prior year, honoring both “conceptual innovation and potential to motivate new research and further conceptual investigation” to advance the field.

Lu’s winning paper, “A Socioecological-Genetic Framework of Culture and Personality: Their Roots, Trends, and Interplay” (Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 74:363-390, 2023), was co-authored with MIT Sloan Organization Studies PhD student Laura Changlan Wang and Verónica Benet-Martínez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra).

The award was announced in October, and will be presented during an awards ceremony at the SPSP Annual Convention February 2025 in Denver.

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.

Steve Eppinger, General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management and Professor of Management Science and Innovation, was chosen to deliver the 2024 OMEGA RHO Distinguished Lecture on Operations Research and Management Science, a lecture series presented as a plenary at ORSA/TIMS (Operations Research Society of America/The Institute of Management Sciences) and INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Meetings. This award is sponsored by the Omega Rho Honor Society, which promotes and recognizes superior scholarship and leadership in operations research and management science (and formally became part of INFORMS in 1998). Eppinger is the sixth MIT faculty member to receive this honor over the past four decades.

Eppinger presented his lecture, titled "Adventures in Engineering Management," as a keynote at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in October 2024 in Seattle. 

Emil Verner, Albert F. (1942) & Jeanne P. Clear Career Development Associate Professor in Global Management and Associate Professor of Finance, is a recipient of the Excellence Awards in Global Economic Affairs 2024 from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. These awards recognize outstanding young economists in order “to build a community of the brightest young researchers in the area of global economic affairs.”

The citation recognizes Verner’s “significant contributions to the field of Macro-finance and International Economics”; “Verner’s outstanding research contributed to a better understanding of past recessions and crises to help prevent future economic crises.”

The award was announced in October 2024 and the awards ceremony was held during the 3^rd Kiel-CEPR (Centre for Economic Policy Research) Conference on Geoeconomics in Berlin, Germany.