Andrew W. Lo

Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, and a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is also an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

He has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, and has authored several books including Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought, The Econometrics of Financial Markets, In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio, and Healthcare Finance. He is currently an advisor to the Journal of Investment Management and the Journal of Portfolio Management.

Lo’s 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; quantifying the financial consequences of ESG and other forms of impact investing on investment performance; proposing new funding models for fusion energy; 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 and business structures.

His 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 M. Markowitz Award; 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 book Adaptive Markets has also received a number of awards. He is a Fellow of Academia Sinica; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Finance Association, the Econometric Society; FARFE; and the Society of Financial Econometrics.

Lo has a number of industry affiliations, sits on several corporate and non-profit boards, and advises a number of biotech startups. All of these affiliations and conflicts of interest, as well as all compensated engagements over the most recent six years, are disclosed here.

Lo 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. From 1984 to 1988, he was an assistant and associate professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He has been at MIT since 1988.