Salzberg Memorial Lecture

Georgia Perakis is the William F. Pounds Professor and a Professor of Operations Management, Operations Research & Statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is also serving as co-director of the Operations Research Center. On July 1 she started her sabbatical at Harvard Business School where she is spending the year as a Visiting Scholar. Among other leadership roles, for the past year and a half, Perakis served as the John C Head III Dean (Interim) at MIT Sloan and before that, she served as an Associate Dean for Social and Ethical Responsibility in Computing (SERC) in the Schwarzman College of Computing and MIT Sloan. Her research has received many awards and focuses on analytics/AI, in particular, in the intersection of optimization and machine learning with applications in pricing, revenue management, supply chain, sustainability and healthcare among others. She received the CAREER Award from NSF 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.  

Perakis has a passion for supervising Ph.D., masters, and undergraduate students, having graduated 34 PhD and 63 master’s students. She has also received numerous awards for teaching including the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award (2002), the Samuel M. Seegal Award (2012), the Jamieson Prize for excellence in Teaching (2014), the Teacher of the Year Award (2017) and the Outstanding Teaching Award (2024) at MIT Sloan.  

Perakis is currently the Editor in Chief of the M&SOM journal and has served on the editorial board at a number of other journals. She holds a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Athens as well as an MS in applied mathematics and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Brown University. 

Accepting the Award for the  Salzberg Corporation Medallion winner, Schneider Electric, is  Agustin Lopez Diaz

A multicultural leader raised in Mexico, Agustin Lopez Diaz has worked and lived in six countries and led teams across several continents, representing over 100 nationalities. He is currently serving as the Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain (GSC) in North America, where he is spearheading the end-to-end transformation and creating an Impact Supply Chain for our planet and customers through our people and performance.  

With more than 20 years of progressive experience in P&L and functional management in C-level positions, Agustin is passionate about creating value for customers, teams, and the planet. He has devoted his career to improving safety, customer satisfaction, quality, and sustainability, driving performance enhancements and establishing thought leadership in these critical areas among various internal and external stakeholders.  

He holds a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering and Business Administration from UPAEP, as well as a post-graduate degree in negotiation from Michigan State University, and a Management Diploma from the London Business School.