Faculty

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.”

Roberto Fernandez, the William F. Pounds Professor of Organization Studies and 
Georgia Perakis, John C Head III Dean (Interim) and professor of Operations Management, Operations Research & Statistics, each received an MIT Sloan Outstanding Teacher Award. Each year, students nominate instructors for several teaching awards and the final recipients are chosen based on the quantity and quality of their nominations.
 

Mohammad Fazel-Zarandi, research scientist and senior lecturer, was named the  MIT Sloan School Teacher of the Year. Each year, students nominate instructors for several teaching awards, and the final recipients are chosen based on the quantity and quality of their nominations.

Tavneet Suri (Louis E. Seley Professor of Applied Economics) received the Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising, established by the MIT Graduate Student Council to recognize faculty demonstrating “unbounded compassion and dedication towards students.”