Yale SOM's Jonathan Ingersoll Receives the 2002 IAFE/SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year Award

Yale SOM Professor Jonathan Ingersoll, Adrian C. Israel Professor of International Trade and Finance, has been named the 2002 IAFE/SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year by SunGard Trading and Risk Systems, an operating group of SunGard, and the International Association of Financial Engineers (IAFE). The award will be presented to Professor Ingersoll on February 4, 2003, at the United Nations in New York City during IAFE's annual Financial Engineer of the Year awards dinner.

The IAFE/SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year Award recognizes individual contributions to the advancement of financial engineering technology. As the tenth recipient of this prestigious award, Ingersoll was selected for his historic contributions to research and education in multiple areas of finance and economics.

Upon learning of his recognition, Professor Ingersoll said, "I am honored to be named the Financial Engineer of the Year. Most of my academic life has centered on derivatives. In 1973, the Chicago Board Options Exchange opened, the Black-Scholes model was published, and I entered the doctoral program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I like to think we grew up together. Derivatives have received a lot of bad press lately, but like any invention, they can be put to good use or ill. I hope that continued research in this area will improve our understanding of financial contracting."
Ingersoll went on to thank his predecessors, saying "It is now common to say that one's accomplishments could not have been made without the prior work of others, but it has never been more true than in my case. I owe so much to my teachers and contemporaries - many of whom have already been named recipients of this same award. Bob Merton and Fischer Black were on my dissertation committee at MIT. John Cox and Steve Ross were, of course, my co-authors on numerous papers. Myron Scholes and Merton Miller were my colleagues when I began my career at Chicago."