His thesis received the Best Dissertation Award of the Aviation Applications Section of INFORMS in 2008. He held the Xerox Faculty Chair in 2009 and served as the Operations Management and Manufacturing Ph. D. program coordinator in 2009-2011. He is the co-recipient of the 2009 INFORMS Best Paper in Service Science, POMS 2012 Healthcare Best Paper awards, and the 2013 Lave-Weil Prize. Dr. Akan won the Gerald L. Thompson Teaching Award in 2014 at Carnegie Mellon University. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2014. His research interests include pricing and revenue management, mechanism design, liver allocation, matching markets, stochastic modeling, queueing theory, manufacturing and service operations management, and healthcare delivery systems.