Faculty

John Little received the 2014 Sheth Foundation Medal for Exceptional Contribution to Marketing Scholarship and Practice. The award recognizes "enduring and transformational contributions" to both marketing scholarship and marketing practice. He received the award at an exclusive banquet during the annual INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, at Emory University in Atlanta. A special session followed, in which Professors John Hauser of MIT, Jim Lattin of Stanford, and John Roberts of the London Business School described Little's marketing accomplishments in detail.

Karen Zheng has won Second Prize in the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Behavioral Operations Management Section Best Working Paper Competition. Zheng was honored for her working paper, “Transparency and Indirect Reciprocity in Social Responsibility: An Incentivized Experiment,” co-authored with Tim Kraft (of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business) and her PhD student Leon Valdes (of MIT Sloan).

Yanchong (Karen) Zheng has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her project entitled “A Closed-Loop Methodology for Investigating Trust, Culture, and Information Sharing in Global Supply Chains.” CAREER Awards are the NSF’s “most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.”

Robert Merton has received MIT’s 2021-2022 James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, which recognizes “extraordinary professional achievement by MIT faculty members” and is MIT’s highest faculty honor.

As “one of the founding architects of modern finance theory,” Merton’s work has “become an integral part of the global financial system”; the Killian Award citation notes his “profound commitment to innovation through scientific research and to advancing pedagogy in financial economics, as well as to serving as a highly valued mentor to graduate students and junior colleagues.” As the 2021-2022 Killian Award Lecturer, Merton will share about his professional activities and accomplishments with the MIT community.

More details on Merton’s receiving the award and on his career achievements can be found in this MIT News article.

 Leonid Kogan has won the NASDAQ Award from the Western Finance Association for the best paper on asset pricing.  Kogan’s winning paper, co-authored with Winston Dou (Wharton) and Wei Wu (Texas A&M), is entitled, “Common Fund Flows: Flow Hedging and Factor Pricing.”

Kristin Forbes was named a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a nonpartisan and independent national membership organization, think tank, and publisher. The CFR is dedicated to being a resource for policymakers and interested citizens to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.

"The Trilateral Commission is a non-governmental, policy-oriented discussion group of about 350 distinguished citizens from Western Europe, North America and Pacific Asia formed to encourage mutual understanding and closer cooperation among these three regions on common problems."

Leonid Kogan has won the 2014 Amundi Smith Breeden Prize (first prize) for the best paper in The Journal of Finance, which is the official publication of the American Finance Association and one of the most widely cited academic journals in finance and economics. His winning paper (co-authored with D. Papanikolaou of Kellogg) is entitled “Growth Opportunities, Technology Shocks, and Asset Prices.”

Retsef Levi and Tom Magnanti 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."

Retsef Levi and Y. Karen Zheng have won the 2020 MSOM Responsible Research in Operations Management award for the paper, “The Impact of Unifying Agriculture Wholesale Markets on Prices and Farmers' Profitability,” coauthored with Manoj Rajan and Somya Singhvi. MSOM, which stands for Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, presents this award in order to encourage studies that may “make the world a better place,” through “evidence-based” practices.