Faculty Profiles
Thought Leadership
The program is taught by senior members of the MIT Sloan faculty who are globally recognized experts in their fields. Throughout your course of study you will collaborate with these thought leaders to gain new perspective and advance your management capabilities. They serve not only as teachers, but also as colleagues with whom you develop an immediate and lifelong relationship.
Simon Johnson
Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship
MIT Sloan School of Management
Profile
Research specialty
Simon Johnson’s areas of research encompass corporate governance; economic crises; current economic conditions; entrepreneurship and new ventures; government; new stock markets; political economy; sustainability; tax policy; trade policy; and unemployment.
Background
Simon Johnson is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a cofounder of BaselineScenario.com (a much cited website on the global economy), a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers, and a member of the FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee. He is also a weekly contributor to NYT.com’s Economix, a regular Bloomberg columnist, and a contributing business editor to the Huffington Post. Johnson is the coauthor, with James Kwak, of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, a bestselling assessment of the dangers now posed by the US financial sector.
Retsef Levi
J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Management
Associate Professor of Operations Management
Profile
Research specialty
Retsef Levi’s research focuses on the design and performance analysis of efficient algorithms for fundamental stochastic and deterministic optimization models in supply chains, revenue management, logistics, and health care. Levi has a special interest in cost-balancing techniques, data-driven algorithms, and modern linear-programming-based approximation techniques.
Background
Retsef Levi is a member of the Operations Management Group and affiliated with the Operations Research Center and the Computation for Design and Optimization Program. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Tel-Aviv University in 2001 and a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University in 2005. Prior to joining MIT he worked in the Dept. of Mathematical Sciences at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as the holder of the Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellowship. Levi spent more than 11 years in the Israeli Defense Forces as an intelligence officer. After leaving the military, he joined an emerging Israeli high-tech startup as a business development consultant.
Nelson Repenning
Professor of System Dynamics
Profile
Research specialty
Nelson Repenning’s work focuses on understanding the factors that contribute to the successful implementation, execution, and improvement of business processes. His current research interests include safety in high hazard production environments and the connection between efficient internal operations and effective strategic positions.
Background
Repenning works on developing new methods for managing resources in multi-project development environments and the creation of management flight simulators as tools for improving organizational performance. He has received several awards for his work, including best paper recognition from both the California Management Review and the Journal of Product Innovation Management. In 2003 he received the International System Dynamics Society’s Jay Wright Forrester award, which recognizes the best work in the field in the previous five years.
Georgia Perakis
William F. Pounds Professor of Management
Professor of Operations Research and Operations Management
Co-Director of Leaders for Global Operations Program
Profile
Research specialty
Georgia Perakis investigates the theory and practice of optimization and equilibrium problems. She is particularly interested in how optimization models can be applied to solve complex problems in transportation, pricing, and revenue management. She also studies the mathematical structure that lies behind optimization, as well as the equilibrium problems in static and dynamic environments.
Background
Georgia Perakis teaches courses on optimization, quantitative models for managers, analysis of transportation systems, dynamic pricing, and revenue management. She has been awarded the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and the PECASE award from the Office of the President on Science and Technology.
Stewart Myers
Robert C. Merton (1970) Professor of Financial Economics
Professor of Finance
Profile
Research specialty
Stewart Myers research is primarily concerned with the valuation of real and financial assets, corporate financial policy, and financial aspects of government regulation of business. He is the author of influential research papers on many topics, including adjusted present value (APV), rate of return regulation, pricing and capital allocation in insurance, real options, and moral hazard and information issues in capital structure decisions.
Background
Myers is past president of the American Finance Association and elected fellow of the Financial Management Association. He is coauthor of the classic textbook Principles of Corporate Finance, now in its 10th edition. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a principal of The Brattle Group, Inc., and a director of Entergy Corporation.
Dimitris Bertsimas
Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management
Professor of Operations Research
Co-Director, Operations Research Center
Profile
Research specialty
Dimitris Bertsimas’ research interests include optimization, stochastic systems, and data mining and their application. In recent years he has focused on robust optimization, healthcare, and finance.
Background
Dimitris Bertsimas is the codirector of MIT’s Operations Research Center. He has coauthored more than 110 scientific papers and the books Introduction to Linear Optimization (with J. Tsitsiklis, Athena Scientific and Dynamic Ideas, 2008), Data, Models and Decisions (with R. Freund, Dynamic Ideas, 2004), and Optimization over Integers (with R. Weismantel, Dynamic Ideas, 2005). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has received numerous research awards, including the Farkas prize (2008), the Erlang prize (1996), the SIAM prize in optimization (1996), the Bodossaki prize (1998), and the Presidential Young Investigator award (1991-1996).
John Sterman
Jay W. Forrester Professor in Computer Science
Professor of System Dynamics and Engineering Systems
Director, MIT System Dynamics Group
Profile
Research specialty
John Sterman's research centers on improving decision-making in complex systems, including corporate strategy and operations, energy policy, public health, and environmental sustainability. His research ranges from the dynamics of organizational change and the implementation of sustainable improvement programs to climate change and the implementation of policies to promote a sustainable world.
Background
Sterman is the author of many scholarly and popular articles on the challenges and opportunities facing organizations today, including the book Modeling for Organizational Learning and the award-winning textbook Business Dynamics. He has pioneered the development of “management flight simulators” of corporate and economic systems. These flight simulators are now used by corporations, universities, and governments around the world.
Sterman has won seven awards for teaching excellence at MIT.
John Van Maanen
Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management
Professor of Organization Studies
Profile
Research specialty
John Van Maanen studies groups of people by living with them. He has studied Gloucester fishermen, Disneyland ride operators, US patrol officers, and London detectives and their supervisors. Cultural descriptions figure prominently in his writings about occupational conflicts, organizational careers, and work routines. His recent research examines the social history of ethnographic understanding of work organizations and the ways particular occupational identities take shape and change work settings.
Background
John Van Maanen’s publications include methodological studies on writing organizational ethnographies and on power relations in the workplace. His Tales of the Field on Writing Ethnography (University of Chicago Press, 1988) has been classic reading in many doctoral programs in management around the world. His studies of high-tech industries have been influential in the realm of management.
Fiona Murray
David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology
Associate Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management
Faculty Director, MIT Entrepreneurship Center
Profile
Research specialty
Murray’s research interests center on science commercialization, the organization of scientific research, and the role of science in national competitiveness. She is interested in emerging organizational arrangements for effective commercialization of science, including public-private partnerships, nonprofits, venture philanthropy, and university-initiated seed funding. Murray is well known for her work on how economic incentives influence the rate and direction of scientific progress.
Background
Fiona Murray received BA and MA degrees in chemistry from the University of Oxford before coming to the United States, where she received her doctoral degree from Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Murray works with a range of firms designing global organizations that are both commercially successful and at the forefront of science. Her recent engagements have focused on relationships that span the public and private sectors.
Roberto Fernandez
William F. Pounds Professor in Management
Professor of Organization Studies
Head, MIT Sloan’s Behavioral and Policy Sciences area
Codirector, Economic Sociology PhD Program
Profile
Research specialty
Roberto Fernandez’ research is focused on organizations, social networks, and race and gender stratification. He has extensive experience doing field research in organizations, including an exhaustive five-year case study of a plant retooling and relocation. He is now looking at the organizational processes surrounding the hiring of new talent using data collected in 14 organizations.
Background
Prior to joining MIT in 2000, Fernandez was Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (1994-2000). There he served as the area coordinator in charge of the school’s organizational behavior faculty. Prior to Stanford, he was Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Affairs at Northwestern University (1989-1994). Fernandez is the author of more than 40 articles and research papers published in the top academic journals in his field.
Joseph Weber
Professor of Accounting
Profile
Research specialty
Joseph Weber specializes in empirical work on the importance of accounting information in financial contracts. His recent work documents how an innovation in the commercial debt market—performance pricing—allows for more efficient contracting by reducing the expected renegotiation costs of the contract.
Background
Weber’s research has recently appeared in The Accounting Review, the Journal of Accounting Research, and the Journal of Accounting and Economics. Prior to entering academia, he worked for Price Waterhouse and AXA Financial.
Birger Wernerfelt
J.C. Penney Professor of Management
Professor of Marketing
Profile
Research specialty
Birger Wernerfelt compares alternative ways of trading services. He is best known for A Resource-Based View of the Firm, which is one of the most cited works in the social sciences. Based on the premise that firms are heterogeneous, he characterizes sustainable differences (resources), suggests that optimal competitive strategies are based on these resources, and describes how current resources can be used to develop new ones. He is now working on implications of the adjustment-cost theory, which portrays the employment relationship as an attempt to exploit economies of scale in bargaining costs.
Background
A Danish citizen, Wernerfelt is an economist and management theorist with degrees from the University of Copenhagen and Harvard. In addition to his position at MIT, he has held positions in economics at the University of Copenhagen and in strategy at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, and has conducted research in all three areas.
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