Faculty

Rob Freund has been elected as an INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Fellow, Class of 2018.  This award honoring lifetime achievement recognizes “distinguished individuals who have demonstrated outstanding and exceptional accomplishments and experience in operations research and the management sciences” and who have also provided outstanding service to the profession and to INFORMS. 
 

Catherine Tucker has won the 2018 William F. O’Dell Award from the American Marketing Association. This annual award honors the Journal of Marketing Research article published five years ago (in 2013) that has made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice. Tucker’s winning paper, co-authored with Anja Lambrecht (London Business School), is entitled “When Does Retargeting Work? Information Specificity in Online Advertising” (Journal of Marketing Research, October 2013, 50:5, 561-576).

John Sterman has won the System Dynamics Society Outstanding Service Award. This award recognizes individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the society over an extended period of time, on a volunteer basis, in a way that benefits the development and advancement of system dynamics, helps the society achieve its goals, and sets a standard to inspire others.  Professor Peter Milling, chair of the award committee, noted that awardees are “individuals who besides having exhibited the highest standards of service excellence, dedication, and accomplishment … also have taken initiatives to move the society forward and created positive results for society members and the larger community of people interested in System Dynamics.” He highlighted Sterman’s service in leadership roles on the society’s policy council, as conference program chair, as editor of the System Dynamics Review, and as creator of numerous society initiatives.

Catherine Tucker has won the 2018 INFORMS Society for Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award. This annual award recognizes a paper published in Marketing Science, Management Science, or another INFORMS journal that is regarded as having made a significant long-term impact on the field of marketing. Tucker’s winning paper, co-authored with Avi Goldfarb (University of Toronto), is entitled “Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness.”

Swati Gupta won a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship for Real-Time Decision Making, and was subsequently selected to be funded as a Microsoft Research Fellowship in the spring of 2018.

Gupta also won a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship for Bridging Continuous and Discrete Optimization in the fall of 2017.

The Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowships, given by the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley, are awarded to young scientists within five years of earning their PhD.

Bob Pindyck, along with Deborah Ancona, was awarded the 2018 Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching, established to honor educational innovation and excellence. 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.

Deborah Ancona, along with Bob Pindyck, was awarded the 2018 Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching, established to honor educational innovation and excellence. 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.

Negin Golrezaei has won a 2018 Google Faculty Research Award in Algorithms and Optimization. These awards facilitate interaction between Google and academia (both faculty and graduate students) and support cutting-edge technical academic research (in computer science, engineering, and related fields), for projects whose output will be made available to the research community. The winners were chosen from among over 900 proposals received from 40 countries and over 320 universities. Golrezaei’s award will fund a graduate student for one year to work on her research project entitled, "Pricing and Bidding in Supply Chain of Auctions.”

 Dean Eckles has won a 2018 Amazon Research Award, which recognizes and funds outstanding research projects conducted by PhD students or postdocs under the supervision of the faculty member awardee. Research areas considered for the award are computer vision; economics; knowledge management and data quality; machine learning algorithms and theory; natural language processing; online advertising; operations research and optimization; personalization; robotics; search and information retrieval; security, privacy and abuse prevention; and speech.  Eckles’s awarded research project is entitled, “Complex modeling and inference with online rating data.” 

John Sterman has been elected as a Fellow of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). AAAS Fellows are elected by their peers in recognition of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science. Sterman in particular was recognized for his “distinguished contributions to improving decision-making in complex systems, including corporate strategy and operations, energy policy, public health, environmental sustainability, and climate change.” The 2017 AAAS Fellows were formally announced recently in the AAAS News and Notes section of Science and will be honored at a ceremony in February 2018 at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.