Faculty

Retsef Levi’s paper, “Matching Supply and Demand: Delayed Two-Phase Distribution at Yedioth Group – Models, Algorithms, and Information Technology,” was awarded the 2013 INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. The prize was established in 1998 to commemorate the life and work of Daniel H. Wagner. See the winning paper, which was co-authored by Assaf Avrahami and Yale T. Herer, here.

Andrew Lo and Kara Blackburn were each awarded the 2019 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.

Lori Breslow has been honored as co-author of one of the Top Ten AERA (American Educational Research Association) Journal Articles in 2014. The article, co-authored with Jennifer DeBoer (Purdue), Glenda Stump (ASU), and Andrew Ho (Harvard), is entitled “Changing ‘Course’: Reconceptualizing Variables for Massive Open Online Courses.”

Andrew W. Lo’s book "Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought" (Princeton University Press, 2017) has won the 2018 Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) Award for Excellence in Social Sciences, from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. The annual awards recognize “the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in 58 categories” and have been judged since 1976 by peer publishers, librarians, and medical professionals. The award was presented during the PSP Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.

Tom Magnanti and Retsef Levi have received the 2016 Harold W. Kuhn Award, an annual prize which recognizes an exceptional paper published in Naval Research Logistics during the previous three years. Their winning paper, co-authored with Jack Muckstadt (Cornell University assistant professor), Danny Segev (University of Haifa), and Eric Zarybnisky (MIT SM ’03, PhD ’11), is entitled “Maintenance Scheduling for Modular Systems: Modeling and Algorithms."

Tom Malone (Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management, Professor of Information Technology, and Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence) has been named an Honorary Fellow of the Argentinian Engineers Center (CAI, Centro Argentino de Ingenieros), a nonprofit professional society in Argentina which stresses the significance of engineering to society and the need for engineering in planning and executing projects and policies to further human prosperity. The lifetime title recognizes national and global outstanding contributions to engineering, innovation, and mankind. 

This honor was awarded at a recent online event in August when Malone was also interviewed by the president of CAI (the video portion in English begins around 3:40).

Andrew W. Lo has won the 2017 Harry M. Markowitz Award, sponsored jointly by the Journal of Investment Management and New Frontier Advisors, LLC. This annual award honoring the legacy of financial economist and mathematician Harry Markowitz supports future research and innovation in practical asset management. Lo’s winning paper, chosen from the 2017 papers published in JOIM, is entitled, “Moore’s Law vs. Murphy’s Law in the Financial System: Who’s Winning?” (Journal of Investment Management, 15(1):17-38).

Rahul Mazumder has won the 2020 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers.  His winning paper, “Fast Best Subset Selection: Coordinate Descent and Local Combinatorial Optimization Algorithms” (Operations Research 68(5):1517-1537, September-October 2020), was co-authored with his MIT ORC (Operations Research Center) PhD student Hussein Hazimeh. 
The citation notes: “The paper presents a novel algorithm for the Best Subset Selection problem (BSS)…a fundamental problem in high-dimensional statistics, where sparse solutions with good explanatory power are crucial for practical use. Yet, it is NP-hard and…labeled computationally intractable…The authors combine tools and techniques from high-dimensional statistics, continuous optimization, integer programming, and open-source software development to provide the community with a highly effective heuristic for BSS, one which has strong theoretical underpinnings, outperforms existing state-of-the-art codes in many cases, and is easy to generalize to other settings.”

Rahul Mazumder is the recipient of a 2018 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.”

The awards were announced last week. Mazumder is one of five MIT awardees among the 31 scientists chosen from a broad spectrum of technical fields, whose research was deemed to hold “strong promise across a wide range of naval-relevant science and technology areas,” “based on past performance, technical merit, potential for scientific breakthrough and long-term university commitment.”

Mazumder’s three-year project, entitled “Combinatorial Statistical Inference with Mathematical Optimization,” will create new methodology to address key inferential problems central to modern applied statistics and data science, using techniques in mathematical optimization. This new methodology could then be applied to a wide range of problems in support of the U.S. Navy and Department of Defense.

Arathi Mehrotra has won an MIT Sloan School Outstanding Teacher Award for the 2020-2021 academic year. Michelle Hanlon in Accounting 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."