Andrew W. Lo

Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of Finance, MIT Sloan; Director, MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering

Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor, MIT Sloan; Director, MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, a principal investigator at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and an affiliated faculty member of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received a B.A. in economics from Yale University in 1980, and an A.M. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1984.

His current research spans five areas: evolutionary models of investor behavior and adaptive markets, systemic risk and financial regulation, quantitative models of financial markets, financial applications of machine-learning techniques and secure multi-party computation, and healthcare finance.  Recent projects include: deriving risk aversion, loss aversion, probability matching, and other behaviors as emergent properties of evolution in stochastic environments; constructing new measures of systemic risk and comparing them across time and systemic events; applying spectral analysis to investment strategies to decompose returns into fundamental frequencies; and developing new statistical tools for predicting clinical trial outcomes, incorporating patient preferences into the drug approval process, and accelerating biomedical innovation via novel financing structures.

Lo has published extensively in academic journals (see http://alo.mit.edu) and his most recent book is Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought. Lo’s awards include Batterymarch, Guggenheim, and Sloan Fellowships; the Paul A. Samuelson Award; the Eugene Fama Prize; the IAFE-SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year; the Global Association of Risk Professionals Risk Manager of the Year; the Harry Markowitz Prize; the Managed Futures Pinnacle Achievement Award; one of TIME’s “100 most influential people in the world”; and awards for teaching excellence from both Wharton and MIT. His most recent book, Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought, has also received a number of awards, listed here. He is a Fellow of Academia Sinica, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Society of Financial Econometrics.

Lo is also a member of the Board of Overseers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications at the National Academy of Sciences, a board member of Roivant Sciences and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and a member of advisory committees at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and FINRA.