Faculty

Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu and MIT Sloan professor Simon Johnson, PhD ’89, as well as James A. Robinson from the University of Chicago, have won the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited their “studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” 

The trio’s research shows why "societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better."

Johnson and Acemoglu are co-authors of the 2023 book "Power and Progress: Our 1,000-Year Struggle over Technology & Prosperity."

Read more at MIT News. Learn more about their research in Ideas Made to Matter.

Jackson Lu, Sloan School Career Development Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies,  recently received five honors:

First, Lu is a recipient of the Early Career Achievement Award from the Human Resources (HR) Division of the Academy of Management (AOM),  which honors distinguished contributions of HR scholars during their early- to mid-career stage (within 7 years of receiving their PhD) and which recognizes Lu's research stream on the Bamboo Ceiling. The AOM HR Division Chair said: “The award acknowledges Professor Lu’s clear record of excellence in research and the promise that his impact will continue to have on the science, teaching, and practice of human resource management. This is the most prestigious early career award granted by the HR Division of the Academy of Management. Professor Lu is a true rising star within the HR research community."

Second, a paper regarding the Bamboo Ceiling in starting salaries  (“Asians Don’t Ask? Relational Concerns, Negotiation Propensity, and Starting Salaries,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 108(2), 273-290) was runner-up for the Best Published Paper Award (for papers published in the past year) from the Careers Division of the AOM.

Third, Lu received the AOM IM (International Management) Division Florida International University Business Emerging Scholar Award for outstanding contributions to international management scholarship by a junior scholar (within 8 years of PhD).  This award recognizes Lu’s research stream on how multicultural experiences (e.g., working abroad) shape key organizational outcomes.

Fourth, Lu is also a winner of the 2024 “Responsible Research in Management” Award sponsored by the AOM Fellows (co-sponsored by the Community for Responsible Research in Business and Management), which honors “significant contributions to the science and practice of management” with “recent research that benefits society by producing credible and useful knowledge” that informs policy and influences practice.  Lu’s winning paper is entitled, “Global Leaders for Global Teams: Leaders with Multicultural Experiences Communicate and Lead More Effectively, Especially in Multinational Teams” (Organization Science, 33(4), 1554-1573).

The honors above were announced in September at the Chicago at the Annual Meeting of the AOM.

Additionally, the paper above, ("Global Leaders for Global Teams: Leaders with Multicultural Experiences Communicate and Lead More Effectively, Especially in Multinational Teams”) also won the 2024 Outstanding Empirical Paper Award from the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM).  This award was presented at the IACM Annual Conference in June in Singapore.
 

Tom Malone, Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technology, has received the Roosevelt “Rosey” Thompson Award from the U.S. Presidential Scholars Foundation. This award honors “exceptional Presidential Scholars alumni who embody … outstanding qualities of civil service” and whose “significant contributions have enriched our society”:  “An organizational theorist, Malone anticipated developments at the interface of business and information technology that surround us today. He has co-founded three software companies, published six books, and received 11 patents for inventions.”

The award was presented in June at a ceremony during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Scholars 60th Anniversary Celebration in Washington, D.C.

Negin Golrezaei, W. Maurice Young (1961) Career Development Associate Professor of Management and Associate Professor of Operations Management, has won a Distinguished Paper Award recognizing three of the best papers presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2024. 

Golrezaei’s winning paper, “Online Combinatorial Optimization with Group Fairness Constraints” (Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence), was co-authored with Rad Niazadeh (Chicago Booth School of Business), Kumar Kshitij Patel (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago), and Fransisca Susan (Two Sigma; 2023 MIT PhD in Operations Research).

Haihao Lu, incoming Assistant Professor of Operations Research and Statistics, won the 2024 Beale — Orchard-Hays Prize for Excellence in Computational Mathematical Programming from the Mathematical Optimization Society. One of the highest honors in the field of computational optimization, this prize is awarded every three years for a publication during the prior six years.

Lu’s winning papers are:

1) Faster First-Order Primal-Dual Methods for Linear Programming Using Restarts and Sharpness, co-authored with David Applegate (Google Research), Oliver Hinder (University of Pittsburgh), and Miles Lubin (Hudson River Trading; formerly Google Research); Mathematical Programming, Vol. 201, 133-184 (2023)

2) Practical Large-Scale Linear Programming Using Primal-Dual Hybrid Gradient, co-authored with David Applegate, Mateo Díaz (Johns Hopkins University), Oliver Hinder, Miles Lubin, Brendan O’Donoghue (Google DeepMind), and Warren Schudy (Google Research); Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021)

The award recognizes “long-term potential to make first-order methods a practical option to solve large-scale linear programming … adaptability to GPUs and other parallel computing architectures; the careful algorithmic engineering work to make the methods practical; and the sophisticated and innovative analysis used to justify and describe the performance of the algorithms.”

Rahul Bhui, Class of 1958 Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Marketing, has won the 2024 Vernon L. Smith Excellence Award in Experimental Finance from the Society for Experimental Finance. This annual award recognizes path-breaking research deemed to be "the best article published in [the year prior] using the ‘Experimental Finance’ method” across all peer-reviewed journals. 

The award recognizes Bhui’s “important contribution to categorical thinking, giving … a clearer view of the drivers and consequences of inattention.” His winning paper, “Attention Constraints and Learning in Categories” (Management Science, 69(9):5394-5404, Sept. 2023), was co-authored with Peiran Jiao (Maastricht University). An MIT Sloan “Ideas Made to Matter” article also provides more information on the paper.

Erin Kelly, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies, has won the 2024 Ellen Galinsky Generative Researcher Award from the Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN). “This award recognizes a work-family researcher or research team who have/has contributed break-through thinking to the work-family field via theory, measures, and/or data sets that led to expansive application, innovation, and diffusion, including the sharing of research opportunity in the spirit of open science.” Kelly specifically is recognized for having “had a profound impact on the work and family field through her influential work on schedule control, diversity and equity, and work redesign, and her commitment to bridging the boundaries across research, policy and practice.”

See more about the award at the WFRN website.

Chris Knittel, George P. Shultz Professor and Professor of Applied Economics, has won the 2023-2024 MIT Undergraduate Economics Association (UEA) Professor of the Year Award, citing his “engaging, charismatic, and illustrative style of teaching.” 

One sample nomination included: “Knittel was an amazing professor. The real-life simulations we did in class were the most amazing application of economics in the energy world ... Besides being a great teacher, he went out of his way to interact with students during the class which I had never seen before in a class of that size. I felt comfortable asking questions because of the culture he established.”

Nominations from MIT undergraduates are judged by a UEA committee to recognize one faculty member and teaching assistant each year.

Rama Ramakrishnan, professor of the practice in the Operations Research and Statistics Group, has won a 2024 Teaching with Digital Technology Award from MIT for his innovative use of digital tools in his teaching.

These student-nominated, student-judged awards recognize faculty and instructors who have effectively used digital technology to improve teaching and learning at MIT. This recognition also gives the MIT community the opportunity to learn from their innovative practices.

The awards are co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor. This year students submitted a total of 136 nominations, and six winners were selected.

Mike Whinston, MIT Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and Professor of Applied Economics and of MIT Department of Economics, has won the 2024 Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize from the Toulouse School of Economics in France. This annual prize recognizes “a renowned international economist whose research, in the spirit of the work undertaken by Professor Jean-Jacques Laffont, combines both the theoretical and the empirical.”