Dimitris Bertsimas SM ’87, PhD ’88, a leading figure in operations research, has been named the recipient of the 2025-26 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award. It is the highest honor the MIT faculty grants to its own professors.
Bertsimas is the Boeing Professor of Operations Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he has made substantial contributions to business practices in many fields. He has also been a prolific advisor of graduate students and an enterprising leader of academic programs, serving as the inaugural faculty director of the Master of Business Analytics (MBAn) program since 2016, associate dean of business analytics since 2019, and vice provost for open learning since 2024.
“To be recognized among the group of Killian Award winners is a very humbling experience,” Bertsimas says. “I love this institution. This is where I have spent the last 40 years of my life. We don’t do things at MIT to get awards; we do things here because we believe they are important. It’s definitely something I’m proud of, but I’m also humbled to be in the company of many of my heroes.”
The Killian Award citation states 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.” It also notes that his “scholarly contributions are both vast and groundbreaking.”
Bertsimas received his BS in electrical engineering and computer science from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. He moved to MIT in 1985 for his graduate work, earning his MS in operations research and his PhD in applied mathematics and operations research. After completing his doctoral work in 1988, Bertsimas joined the MIT faculty, and has remained at the Institute ever since.
A powerhouse researcher, Bertsimas has tackled a wide range of problems during his career. One area of his work has focused on optimization, the development of mathematical tools to help business operations be as efficient and logical as possible. Another focus of his scholarship has been machine learning and its interaction with optimization as well as stochastic systems. Overall, Bertsimas has developed the concepts and tools of “robust optimization,” allowing people to make better decisions under uncertainty.
At times in his career, Bertsimas has focused on health care issues, examining how machine learning can be used to develop more tools for personalized medical care. But all told, Bertsimas’ work has long been applied across many industries, from medicine to finance, energy, and beyond. The fingerprints of his research can be found in financial portfolios, school bus routing, supply chain logistics, energy use, medical data mining, diabetes management, and more.
“My strategy has been to address significant challenges that the world faces, and try to make progress,” Bertsimas says.
A dedicated educator, Bertsimas has been the principal doctoral thesis advisor to 103 MIT PhD students as of this spring. Lately he has been advising about five doctoral students per year, a remarkable number.
“Working with my doctoral students is my principal and most favorite activity,” Bertsimas says. “Second, in my research, I’ve tried to address problems that I think are important. If you solve them, something changes, in what we teach or in industry, and in short order. Not in 50 years, but in two years. Third, I feel it’s my obligation to educate — not only to create new knowledge, but to transmit it.”
As such, Bertsimas has been the founder and driving force behind MIT Sloan’s leading-edge MBAn program, and has thrown himself into leading MIT’s Open Learning efforts over the past year. He has also founded 10 data analytics companies during his career, while co-authoring hundreds of papers and eight graduate-level textbooks on data analytics.
The Killian Award was founded in 1971 in recognition of “extraordinary professional accomplishments by full-time members of the MIT faculty,” as the citation notes. The award is named after James R. Killian Jr., who served as president of MIT from 1948 to 1959 and as chair of the MIT Corporation from 1959 to 1971.
By tradition, Bertsimas will give a lecture in spring 2026 about his work.
The Killian Award is the latest honor in Bertsimas’ career. In 2019, he received the John von Neumann Theory Prize from INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science, for his contributions to the theory of operations research and the management sciences. He also received the INFORMS President’s Award in 2019 for his contributions to societal welfare. Bertsimas was elected to be a member of the National Academy of Engineering at age 43.
Reflecting on his career so far, Bertsimas emphasizes that he operates on a philosophy centered around positive thinking, high aspirations, and a can-do attitude applied to making a difference in the world for other people. Bertsimas praised MIT Sloan and the Operations Research Center as ideal places for him to pursue his work, due to its interdisciplinary nature, the quality of the students, and its openness to founding firms based on breakthrough work.
“I have been very happy at Sloan,” Bertsimas says. “It gives me the opportunity to work on things that are important with exceptional students predominantly from the Operations Research Center, and encourages my entrepreneurial spirit. Being at MIT Sloan and at the Operations Research Center has made a material difference in my career and my life.”
