Perakis wins MIT Sloan teaching award

LGO management faculty co-director Georgia Perakis will receive one of two Jamieson 2014 Jamieson Teaching Awards from the MIT Sloan School of Management. This prize, funded by MIT alumnus J. Burgess Jamieson, was established to honor educational innovation and excellence.

 Georgia Perakis   

Perakis is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management at MIT Sloan and a professor of operations research and operations management. She teaches courses on optimization, quantitative models for managers, analysis of transportation systems, dynamic pricing, and revenue management.

The Jamieson Prize selection committee recognized Perakis for her "dedication, passion, and innovative thinking that have had a long-standing impact on the MIT Sloan School of Management, with exceptional contributions to the curriculum, the learning environment, and the students at Sloan."

The committee noted that Perakis "has played a major role in the development of five innovative business cases that are regularly used in the 'Data Models and Decisions' course in the core MBA, Executive MBA, and Sloan Fellows curricula as well as in advanced business analytics courses. She has also brought research and practice into the classroom; one initiative involves innovative integration across programs, with PhD students working with LGO students on partner company projects, several of which have enriched both the MBA and Executive MBA program curricula."

One of those internship collaborations was a project with LGO partner company NStar involving Perakis, Sid Balwani (LGO '12) and Joline Uichanco, an MIT Sloan PhD student in operations research. The resulting paper, "Stochastic Optimization for Resource Allocation with Random Emergencies," won the 2012 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Service Science Section Best Paper Award.

LGO program director Don Rosenfield said, "Georgia is a truly superior teacher and a wonderful mentor. She is truly dedicated to her students, and a great example is the relationships she has with her LGO students in her internship projects. We are very fortunate to have her in the program."