Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the director of MIT's Laboratory for Financial Engineering. He joined CSAIL as a principal investigator in 2011.  He received his A.M. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1984, his B.A. in economics from Yale University in 1980, and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1977. He began his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where he was an assistant and associate professor from 1984 to 1988.

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.  His awards include Sloan and Guggenheim Fellowships, the Paul A. Samuelson Award, the Harry M. Markowitz Award, the CFA Institute’s James R. Vertin Award, as well as election to Academia Sinica, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and TIME’s 2012 list of the “100 most influential people in the world.” His book Adaptive Markets has also received a number of awards, listed here, and he has received teaching awards from the University of Pennsylvania and MIT.

Lo is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, 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.