Faculty

Robert B. McKersie is the recipient of the 2008 Cushing/Gavin Award from the Boston Labor Guild. The Guild is a community labor management organization affiliated with the Archdiocese of Boston. Each year it honors an individual who has made outstanding contributions as a neutral to our labor management community.

MIT Sloan Professor Robert C. Merton, along with Myron Scholes, won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997 for a new method to determine the value of derivatives.  In collaboration with the late Fischer Black, they developed a pioneering formula for the valuation of stock options. The Black-Scholes-Merton options pricing model is a tenet of modern finance. Merton received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1970.

Ross Watts has been inducted into the Australian Accounting Hall of Fame, which honors and celebrates outstanding academic and practitioner contributions to the advancement of accounting in Australia. Watts is the first expatriate inductee.

Otto Scharmer has received the Leonardo Award 2016 in Thought Leadership, a Leonardo European Corporate Learning Award addressing the “future of learning.” The award recognizes the value and contribution of Scharmer’s management method “Theory U.”

Otto Scharmer and Dimitris Bertsimas were each awarded the 2015 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.

Erin Scott and Scott Stern have each won the 2021 Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award from the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management, for their Entrepreneurial Strategy course developed with co-winner Joshua Gans (University of Toronto) and first launched at MIT Sloan and the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.
This annual award, sponsored by Yeshiva University, honors development and implementation of an innovation in entrepreneurship pedagogy. Evaluation of entrepreneurship courses is based on the innovativeness of the content and pedagogical process, demonstrated and potential impact and transferability, and the course’s relevance (to both students and entrepreneurial practice). The award committee recognized Entrepreneurial Strategy as “one of the very finest innovations in the area of entrepreneurship this year.”

Kerry Siani (Assistant Professor of Finance) has won an MIT Sloan School Outstanding Teacher Award for the 2022-2023 academic year. Mohammed Fazel Zarandi (Senior Lecturer in Operations Research/Statistics; Research Scientist) also won an Outstanding Teacher Award.  Each year, students nominate instructors for these teaching awards and the final recipients are chosen based on the quantity and quality of their nominations. Deputy Dean Michael Cusumano thanked the winners of this year’s teaching awards for “exemplifying the dedication to pedagogical excellence that is so central to our mission at MIT Sloan.”

Duncan Simester and Catherine Tucker have won the 2020 Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award from the American Marketing Association. This award recognizes a Journal of Marketing Research article published five years earlier that has made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice. Their winning paper, “Harbingers of Failure” (Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 52, No. 5, October 2015), was co-authored with Song Lin (HKUST Business School), who was an MIT Sloan PhD student when the paper was written (PhD 2015), and Eric Anderson (Kellogg School of Management), who also obtained his PhD at MIT Sloan (in 1995).

Sinan Aral has been appointed to serve on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Alan Turing Institute in London — the British national institute for data science, headquartered at the British Library. Created in 2015 by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and five founding universities (Cambridge, Oxford,  Edinburgh, University College London, and Warwick), the Institute’s mission is “to make great leaps in data science research in order to change the world for the better.” The seven-member Scientific Advisory Board, an independent group which will provide strategic advice to the institute’s Board of Trustees and leadership team on its research program, includes experts from organizations around the world in academia, industry, and government, with a diverse range of skills and specializations spanning privacy, machine learning, engineering, microeconomics, and entrepreneurship.

Eric So and Vivek Farias (Operations Management) were each awarded the 2020 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. The Jamieson faculty prize is selected by a review committee at MIT.