MIT Sloan makes 4 new academic appointments

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has made four new research appointments at the Sloan School of Management.

Catherine Wolfram and Benjamin Vatter join the school as professor of energy economics and senior lecturer of applied economics, respectively. MIT has also named Swati Gupta and Chara Podimata as assistant professors of operations research and statistics.

Wolfram comes to MIT from Harvard, where most recently she was a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Between March 2021 and October 2022 she served as the deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics for the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Vatter takes up his new post at the Sloan School after previously working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. His research focuses on industrial organization, health economics and econometrics, and some of his most recent work centers on an analysis of vertical integration between hospitals and insurers.

Gupta takes the new AP role after five years at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on optimization, machine learning and algorithmic fairness. Podimata joins from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a postdoctoral fellow. Her research has focused on incentive-aware machine learning, decision-making under uncertainty and online learning.

The Sloan School of Management is MIT’s business school. It offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs, as well as executive education.