Profile

Emanuel Derman

Professor

Bio

Professor Emanuel Derman joined Columbia University's Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research in 2003 where he is the Director of the Financial Engineering Program and co-Director of the Center for Financial Engineering. Prior to joining Columbia, he was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, where he was head of the quantitative strategies group in the equities division, and then head of quantitative risk strategies in firm-wide risk. He is best known for his work on the Black-Derman-Toy interest-rate model and for developing local volatility models of the implied volatility smile. He was the IAFE/Sungard Financial Engineer of the Year in 2000. Professor Derman's research interests include quantitative finance, financial engineering, derivatives valuation, volatility models, and risk management. His memoir, My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, was published in 2004 and was selected as one of Business Week's top ten books of the year. His newest book Models Behaving Badly, was published by Free Press in October 2011. Professor Derman studied at the University of Cape Town, and received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Columbia University in 1973.