Faculty

Kate Kellogg and Rodrigo Verdi were each awarded the 2021 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. See Kellogg's acceptance speech here.

Lotte Bailyn has received the 2021 Centennial Medal from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). The highest honor awarded by GSAS, the medal is given to “four distinguished alumni who have made fundamental and lasting contributions to knowledge, to their disciplines, to their colleagues, and to society.”

The award citation notes Bailyn’s “transformative” scholarship, “profound insights,” and leadership: “There is no greater authority on the dynamics of the workplace and the family than Lotte Bailyn … She has been overturning conventional assumptions about organizational behavior and productivity for decades, demonstrating that valuing employees’ lives outside of work actually leads to better business outcomes.

”More details on Bailyn’s background and career achievements can be found in the full Centennial Medal Citation.

Negin (Nicky) Golrezaei is the recipient of a 2021 Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Known as one of the oldest and most selective U.S. science and technology basic-research programs, the ONR YIP funds early-career academic researchers (investigators) “whose scientific pursuits show outstanding promise for supporting the Department of Defense, while also promoting their professional development.”

Following an extremely competitive selection process, the awards were announced recently. Golrezaei is one of three MIT awardees among the 38 scientists chosen from a broad spectrum of naval-relevant technical fields across science and engineering, “who show exceptional promise for doing creative research,” with “prior academic achievement and potential for significant scientific breakthrough” being key criteria.

Golrezaei’s three-year project, entitled “Finding a Needle in a Haystack:  Utilizing Structures and Predictive Information in Online Optimization,” will focus on designing powerful and fast-learning online learning algorithms that optimally take advantage of the structures and predictive information regarding the underlying time-varying combinatorial environments where decision-makers have a great deal of uncertainty about those environments. Her fast-learning algorithms will better equip decision-makers who face an exponentially large number of actions from which to choose, and the algorithms can be applied to a wide range of problems in support of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.

Rodrigo Verdi and Nick Pudar (System Dynamics) were named co-winners of the MIT Sloan School Teacher of the Year for the 2020-2021 academic year. 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."

Otto Scharmer is the inaugural recipient of the Elevating Humanity Award from the Organization Development (OD) Network. Scharmer is credited with directly inspiring this new annual award by championing the Organization Development “countermovement” against the traditional profit-centric management approach, “bringing humanity back into focus” with his book Theory U and, as co-founder of the Presencing Institute, “elevating humankind on a global scale through the Presencing Institute’s collective effort to help oppressed, marginalized, impoverished, and fractured populations” (Professor Bill Brendel, OD Network Board Trustee). More information on the impact of Scharmer’s work can be found in the award announcement in this OD Network News article. 

 

Bill Aulet was named the 2021 USASBE (United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship) Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year. This award recognizes distinguished leadership over a number of years within the field of entrepreneurship education, with winners having contributed substantive advancements to the way in which scholars think about and approach entrepreneurship teaching and learning.

The USABE tweet announcing Aulet’s award included: “He's changing the way entrepreneurship is understood, taught & practiced in the world.” Julienne Shields, USABE CEO, explains that Aulet is “unique … not only a beacon of inspiration for his own students, but also a luminary for his peers teaching and pushing educators to approach their classes and coursework with innovation and passion ... one of the most impactful thought-leaders in entrepreneurship education …”

See the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship (Trust Center) press release for further details about the award and about Aulet’s contributions to the field. Aulet has served as the managing director of the Trust Center since 2010.

Chris Knittel has won the 2020 International Journal of Industrial Organization (IJIO) Best Empirical Paper Award.  Knittel, along with co-authors Konstantinos Metaxoglou and André Trindade, won for the paper, “Environmental Implications of Market Structure: Shale Gas and Electricity Market.” Winners of the Best Paper Award are selected by the IJIO editors and announced in the last issue of each year.

Dimitris Bertsimas and Alex Jacquillat have won the 2020 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.

Their winning paper, “From predictions to prescriptions: A data-driven response to COVID-19,” was co-authored with Léonard Boussioux, Ryan Cory-Wright, Arthur Delarue, Vassilis Digalakis Jr., Driss Lahlou Kitane, Michael Li, Agni Orfanoudaki, Theodore Papalexopoulos, Ivan Paskov, Kimberly Villalobos Carballo, Holly Wiberg, and Cynthia Zeng (all MIT Operations Research Center PhD students advised by Bertsimas); Omar Skali Lami (ORC PhD student advised by Bertsimas and Georgia Perakis); Galit Lukin (Datadog, ORC SM ’20, advised by Bertsimas); Jean Pauphilet (London Business School, ORC PhD ’20, advised by Bertsimas); Luca Mingardi (Interpretable AI, MIT Sloan MBAn ’20, advised by Bertsimas); Hamza Tazi Bouardi (BCG GAMMA, MIT Sloan MBAn ’20, advised by Bertsimas); and two of Bertsimas’s former postdocs, Omid Nohadani (Northwestern) and Bartolomeo Stellato (Princeton).

Dimitris Bertsimas and Alex Jacquillat have won the 2020 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.

Their winning paper, “From predictions to prescriptions: A data-driven response to COVID-19,” was co-authored with Léonard Boussioux, Ryan Cory-Wright, Arthur Delarue, Vassilis Digalakis Jr., Driss Lahlou Kitane, Michael Li, Agni Orfanoudaki, Theodore Papalexopoulos, Ivan Paskov, Kimberly Villalobos Carballo, Holly Wiberg, and Cynthia Zeng (all MIT Operations Research Center PhD students advised by Bertsimas); Omar Skali Lami (ORC PhD student advised by Bertsimas and Georgia Perakis); Galit Lukin (Datadog, ORC SM ’20, advised by Bertsimas); Jean Pauphilet (London Business School, ORC PhD ’20, advised by Bertsimas); Luca Mingardi (Interpretable AI, MIT Sloan MBAn ’20, advised by Bertsimas); Hamza Tazi Bouardi (BCG GAMMA, MIT Sloan MBAn ’20, advised by Bertsimas); and two of Bertsimas’s former postdocs, Omid Nohadani (Northwestern) and Bartolomeo Stellato (Princeton).

Sinan Aral and Dean Eckles have won the 2020 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) eBusiness Section Best Paper Award. Their winning working paper, “Targeting for Long-Term Outcomes: Evidence from Large-Scale Field Experiments,” was co-authored with Jeremy Yang (their MIT Sloan PhD student) and Paramveer Dhillon (University of Michigan), who is a former MIT Sloan postdoc and research associate.