Georgia Perakis is the John C Head III Dean (Interim) of the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Professor of Operations Management, Operations Research & Statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She has been on the faculty at MIT Sloan since July 1998 and is a Principal Investigator at Jameel Clinic.
Perakis teaches courses and performs research in analytics/AI, in particular in the intersection of optimization and machine learning with applications in pricing, revenue management, supply chain, and healthcare among others. At MIT over the years, she has taught in a variety of programs such as undergraduate, MSc, PhD, MBA, and EMBA programs across MIT. For her teaching, Perakis won the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award in 2002 as well as the Jamieson Prize in 2014 for excellence in teaching, and the Teacher of the Year award (among all faculty at the MIT Sloan School) in 2017.
In her research, she investigates the theory and practice of analytics. She is particularly interested on how to solve complex and practical problems in pricing, revenue management, supply chains, healthcare, and energy applications among many others. She has widely published in some of the flagship journals of the field such as Operations Research, Management Science, M&SOM, Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, and POM among others.
She has received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and the PECASE Award from the Office of the President on Science and Technology. In 2016, she was elected as an INFORMS Fellow, and in 2021 as Distinguished MSOM Fellow. Both of these recognize individuals for lifetime achievement to the field. In addition, her work has received recognition with many awards such as the TSL Best Paper Award, the Best Paper competition of the Informs Service Science Section several times as well as Best Application of Theory Award from NEDSI (Northeast Decision Sciences Institute) Conference among others. Her work on promotions with the Oracle RGBU was a finalist at the Practice Award of the RMP Section of INFORMS in 2015. In addition, her work on predicting demand for new products with Johnson & Johnson won first place at the Applied Research Challenge Competition in 2018. Her paper with Oracle as well as her work with Wayfair both received second place in the M&SOM practice-based best paper competitions in 2019 and 2021 respectively. Her work was also a finalist at the JD.com competition at the 2019 POM conference as well as in the IAAA (Innovative Applications of Analytics Award). Her paper on subsidies received the 2019 best paper award published in Management Science in the last three years. Her work on COVID-19 won the best conference paper award at ICSS, second place at the INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR competition, second place at the Service Science IBM best student paper competition and honorable mention at the INFORMS Public Sector OR Section. Finally, her work with her PhD students has also been recognized with several awards including the MSOM Society best student paper award, the Service Science best student paper award, the RMP best dissertation award, the CBOM best student paper award and the POM Supply Chain best student paper award.
Perakis has passion supervising PhD, masters, and undergraduate students and builds lifelong relationships with them. So far, she has graduated 30 PhD and 59 masters students. In 2012, she received the Samuel M. Seegal Award for inspiring students to achieve excellence.
In July 2019, she began serving as the co-director of the Operations Research Center (interdepartmental PhD program at MIT reporting to MIT Sloan and the Schwarzman College of Computing). Then in July 2022, she was appointed Associate Dean for SERC (Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing) in the Schwarzman College of Computing and MIT Sloan. She is currently on leave from these positions. During the period 2017-2022, Perakis served as the faculty director of the Executive MBA (EMBA) program at MIT Sloan, while during July 2009-2015, she served as the MIT Sloan faculty co-director of the Leaders for Global Operations (LGO, former LFM) Program at MIT (joint program between MIT Sloan and the School of Engineering). She has also served as the group head of the Operations Management group at MIT Sloan School from 2010-2017.
Perakis is currently the Editor in Chief of the M&SOM journal. She has also served as America’s editor in chief of the Journal of Pricing and Revenue Management and as Department Editor for the journal Service Science in the area of Analytics. She has also served as an Associate Editor for the flagship journals of the field: Management Science, Operations Research, M&SOM, INFORMS Journal on Optimization, and as a senior editor for POM. She has served as the chair of the RMP Section of INFORMS and as the VP of Meetings of the MSOM Society of INFORMS.
Perakis holds a BS in mathematics from the University of Athens as well as an MS in applied mathematics and a PhD in applied mathematics from Brown University.
2021 Distinguished MSOM Fellow
2019 Best Paper Award, Management Science
2018 First Place Applied Research Challenge Competition
2016 INFORMS Fellow