Dr. Andrew W. Lo, a professor in the finance group at the Sloan School of Management, has been named the first Harris & Harris Group Senior Professor at MIT.
Professor Lo is an economist noted as an expert in computational finance and financial engineering. The announcement was made by Provost Mark S. Wrighton.
"In selecting Professor Lo as the inaugural holder of the Harris & Harris Group, Inc., Professorship, we are encouraging a brilliant career and recognizing exceptional achievement," Professor Wrighton said. "Andy Lo, still early in his career, has already made extraordinary contributions to his discipline and we are fortunate to have him as a member of the MIT faculty."
Dean Glen L. Urban, noting that the Sloan School has a strong financial research tradition begun by Professors Fischer Black and Myron Scholes and continued by Professors Robert Merton and John Cox, said Professor Lo is "a leader in the new generation of empirical finance and is defining the state of the art in this field."
The chair was established in December 1993 by Harris & Harris Group, Inc., a publicly owned business development company that commercializes intellectual property and co-founds and develops new companies. In creating the chair, the company noted that MIT, which has established itself as a leading source of technology-based enterprises, "has been of incalculable direct and indirect help to the Harris & Harris Group."
Professor Lo, 34, has been a member of the Sloan School of Management faculty since July 1988. He has been director of the Sloan School's track in financial engineering since July 1993 and since September 1992 has directed the Sloan School's research program in computational finance.
He holds the BA degree from Yale (1980) and the AM and PhD from Harvard (1984), all in economics.
From July 1984 until he joined the Sloan School, he was a member of the faculty at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the W.P. Carey Assistant (later Associate) Professor of Finance. From September 1985 until August 1989, he was a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and from July 1988 to June 1989 he was an Olin Fellow there. He is currently a research associate at the bureau. He was a Batterymarch Fellow at the Sloan School from July 1989 to June 1990.
A version of this article appeared in the June 1, 1994 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 38, Number 35).
