The Buck Weaver Award recognizes distinguished scholars and practitioners who have excelled in both the theory and practice of marketing science, with an emphasis on rigor and real-world relevance.
Nominations for the 2026 Buck weaver Award are due by March 15, 2026. Please refer to this document for further details.
About Buck Weaver
Henry Grady “Buck” Weaver (1889-1949) (B.S. 1911, Georgia Tech) was Director of Customer Research at General Motors. He is credited with pioneering the use of survey questionnaires to study customer preferences for automobiles, laying the foundation for modern marketing research. This award was initially administered by MIT-Sloan before transitioning to the stewardship of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS).
2026 Selection Committee
The selection committee, constituted in accordance with the awards protocol, is now accepting nominations for the 2026 Buck Weaver Award. The committee members are: Thomas Otter (Secretary, ISMS; Goethe Frankfurt) (chair), Doug Bowman (Past-President, ISMS; Emory-Goizueta), Dan McCarthy (VP of Practice, ISMS; Maryland-Smith), Pete Fader (past winner; Penn-Wharton), and Rick Staelin (past winner; Duke-Fuqua).
Most Recent Award Recipient
The 2025 Buck Weaver Award was presented to Peter S. Fader (PhD 1987, MIT) at the 2025 ISMS Marketing Science Conference. Professor Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Professor Fader’s work has shaped both academic theory and business practice, primarily through the development of customer-data-based models and data driven decision-making approaches. His body of work has transformed how practitioners and academics understand customer behavior and lifetime value, bridging rigorous academic scholarship with real-world business impact.
He is a very prominent popularizer of the idea of customer centricity to modern marketing and business practice through his contributions to the theory of marketing science, its implementation in practice, and his work to bridge academia and industry through entrepreneurial activities and outreach. Pete has started several companies to commercialize his models and ideas including Zodiac (acquired by Nike) and Theta in the CLV space, and Incompass Labs focusing on HR analytics. Along with Eric Bradlow, he co-founded the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI), an innovative research center that connected companies with academic researchers.