Faculty

Assistant professor Lira Mota and assistant professor Kerry Siani have won the 2025 North America Best Paper in Corporate Finance from the Society for Financial Studies (SFS).

Their winning working paper is titled “Financially Sophisticated Firms: A Demand-Based Approach to Corporate Financing.”

The award was presented in May 2025 in Hoboken, NJ, at SFS Cavalcade North America 2025, an annual conference that is a joint project of the Review of Financial Studies, Review of Corporate Finance Studies, and Review of Asset Pricing Studies.

Senior Lecturer Chris Noe and Professor Eric So have each won a 2025 Teaching with Digital Technology Award from MIT for their innovative use of digital tools in their 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 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 88 nominations, and seven winners were selected and celebrated at an awards luncheon.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has announced that professor Kristin Forbes, a research associate in the International Finance and Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics programs has joined the Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC).

Forbes is an expert on monetary policy, exchange rates, capital flows, and financial regulation who has also served in a number of important public policy roles, including as a member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and as a deputy assistant secretary at the US Department of the Treasury. 

Members of the BCDC are appointed by the NBER president, with approval of the BCDC committee chair and the chair of the NBER Board of Directors.

Dimitris Bertsimas (MIT Vice Provost for Open Learning and at MIT Sloan, Associate Dean for Business Analytics, Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management, and Professor of Operations Research) has received the 2025-26 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, the highest honor given by the MIT faculty to its own professors, to recognize “extraordinary professional achievement.”

The Killian Award citation notes that his “scholarly contributions are both vast and groundbreaking" and that Bertsimas, “through his remarkable intellectual breadth and accomplishments, incredible productivity, outstanding contributions to theory and practice, and educational leadership, has made enormous contributions to his profession, the Institute, and the world."

As is tradition, Bertsimas will deliver the Killian Award Lecture in the spring of 2026 to share about his work with the MIT community.

Arathi Mehrotra (Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication) and Adrien Verdelhan (Stephens Naphtal Professor of Finance) each received an Outstanding Teacher Award at the MIT Sloan Excellence in Teaching Awards. Each year, students nominate instructors for these 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. This is the second consecutive academic year that Fazel-Zarandi has been voted by students to receive this recognition. Each year, students nominate instructors for several teaching awards, and the final recipients are chosen based on the quantity and quality of their nominations. 

In addition to Teacher of the Year, Fazel-Zarandi also 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."

Emil Verner and Rama Ramakrishnan were each awarded the 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 prize was announced for Verner and Ramakrishnan at the 2025 MIT Sloan Excellence in Teaching Awards for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Lotte Bailyn, the T Wilson (1953) Professor of Management, Emerita, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and will be formally inducted in October 2025. Bailyn was elected under the Educational and Academic Leadership section of the Academy.

Founded in 1780, the Cambridge, Mass.-based American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together, as expressed in its charter, “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” According to a press release, the Academy’s work has helped set the direction of research and analysis in science and technology policy, global security and international affairs, social policy, education, the humanities, and the arts.  

Other notable Academy members include early Americans such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. Other distinguished members have included Margaret Mead, Jonas Salk, Barbara McClintock, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, John Hope Franklin, Georgia O’Keeffe, E.O. Wilson, and Madeleine Albright. The Academy’s current members represent today’s innovative thinkers in every field and profession, including more than 250 Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners. 

All elected members are listed here.

Catherine Wolfram, the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy and a professor of Applied Economics at MIT Sloan, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and will be formally inducted in October 2025. 

Founded in 1780, the Cambridge, Mass.-based American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together, as expressed in its charter, “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” According to a press release, the Academy’s work has helped set the direction of research and analysis in science and technology policy, global security and international affairs, social policy, education, the humanities, and the arts.  

Other notable Academy members include early Americans such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. Other distinguished members have included Margaret Mead, Jonas Salk, Barbara McClintock, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, John Hope Franklin, Georgia O’Keeffe, E.O. Wilson, and Madeleine Albright. The Academy’s current members represent today’s innovative thinkers in every field and profession, including more than 250 Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners. A list of current Academy members in Economics (Wolfram’s field) is available here.

Mark Kritzman, CFA, senior lecturer in Finance, has won the CFA Institute Research Foundation's 2025 James R. Vertin Award.  According to a press release, this honor recognizes individuals who have produced a body of research notable for its relevance and enduring value to investment professionals. During his career, Kritzman has written numerous scholarly articles  and books that have shaped the fields of asset allocation, risk management, and decision science.