2025 Grocery Industry Icons & Innovators

Vivek Farias is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he specializes in operations management and is affiliated with the Operations Research Center. His research focuses on optimization and inference in large-scale stochastic systems, encompassing areas such as supply chains and protein networks.

He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2007, under the guidance of Professor Benjamin Van Roy. Beyond academia, Farias co-founded Celect, an AI-driven predictive analytics platform for retail, which was acquired by Nike. He currently serves as the Co-Founder and CTO of Cimulate, an AI-native commerce platform.

Farias has been recognized with numerous awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, multiple INFORMS prizes, and MIT Sloan’s Outstanding Teacher Award. He also serves as the faculty co-director of the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium.