Press Releases
Richard Roll Selected as the Recipient of the 2009 IAFE/SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year Award
December 16, 2009 — New York, NY
SunGard and the International Association of Financial Engineers (www.iafe.org) today announced that Richard Roll, Japan Alumni Chair in International Finance at the UCLA Anderson School, has been named the 2009 IAFE/SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year (FEOY). The award will be presented to Dr. Roll on February 4, 2010, at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, during the IAFE/SunGard FEOY Award Gala Dinner.
Commenting on his receipt of the 2009 FEOY award, Mr. Roll said, "It is extremely gratifying to receive this award, which has been given before without exception to financial scholars that I greatly admire. I am truly honored to be included in their company."
David Rowe, executive vice president, risk management at SunGard, said, "Richard Roll's long and illustrious career spans both the academic and business sectors. He has made seminal contributions to finance including the theory of interest rate behavior and empirical testing of arbitrage pricing theory. In addition he has consulted to a wide variety of both public and private organizations and co-founded Ross and Roll Asset Management Corporation, where he still serves as co-chairman of the Board, and Compensation Valuation, Inc. For his contributions to both the theory and practice of financial engineering, Richard Roll richly deserves the Financial Engineer of the Year Award for 2009. SunGard is proud to sponsor this award for the 17th consecutive year."
The annual IAFE/SunGard FEOY Award, established in 1993, recognizes individual contributions to the advancement of financial engineering technology. Nominations are submitted by a nominating committee of approximately 100 people, consisting of all the IAFE governing boards. They are then reviewed in a two step process by a selection committee of 25 members, including the IAFE board of directors and senior fellows. This year's selection committee was chaired by Dr. Jack Treynor, an IAFE senior fellow and the 2007 FEOY award winner.
About Richard Roll
Roll is the Japan Alumni Chair in International Finance at the UCLA Anderson School. He is a principal of Compensation Valuation, Inc., and several other financial firms. Roll's business experience also includes three years with the Boeing Company in the early 1960's where he worked on the Minuteman missile and the Saturn moon rocket. During 1985-87, he was a vice president of Goldman, Sachs & Co., where he founded and directed the mortgage securities research group. He has been a consultant for many U.S. corporations, law firms, and government agencies.
Roll has a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from Auburn University and an MBA from the University of Washington. His academic career began in 1968 with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Subsequently, he was on the faculty at Carnegie-Mellon University, The European Institute for Advanced Study of Management in Brussels, and the French business school, Hautes Etudes Commerciales, near Paris. He joined the UCLA faculty in 1976.
Roll has published two books and more than ninety articles in peer-reviewed journals on a variety of financial topics. His 1968 doctoral thesis won the Irving Fisher Prize as the best American dissertation in economics. He has won the Graham and Dodd Award for financial writing (three times) and the Leo Melamed Award for the best financial research by an American business school professor. He is past president of the American Finance Association and is a fellow of the Econometric Society. He is currently or has been an associate editor of eleven different journals in finance and economics.
His non-golf recreations include flying, managing a working ranch and a vineyard, and being the proprietor of a restaurant where his wife is the chef.
Previous Award Recipients
Dr. Roll joins a prestigious list of recipients of the IAFE/SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year Award. They include: Bob Litterman Jack Treynor, Jim Simons, Phelim Boyle, Oldrich Alfons Vasicek, Darrell Duffie, Jonathan Ingersoll, Andrew Lo, Emanuel Derman, John Hull, John C. Cox, Robert Merton, Fischer Black, Mark Rubinstein, Stephen Ross, and Robert Jarrow. Myron Scholes received a lifetime achievement award in 2001.
About the International Association of Financial Engineers (IAFE)
The IAFE is the not-for-profit, professional society dedicated to fostering the profession of quantitative finance by providing platforms to discuss cutting-edge and pivotal issues in the field. Founded in 1992, the IAFE is composed of individual academics and practitioners from banks, broker dealers, hedge funds, pension funds, asset managers, technology firms, regulators, accounting, consulting and law firms, and universities across the globe.
Through frank discussions of current policy issues, sponsoring programs to educate the financial community and recognizing the outstanding achievements in the field, the IAFE acts as a beacon for the development of quantitative finance. Throughout its history, the IAFE's pre-eminent leadership has positioned it to respond with savvy to the evolving needs of the financial engineering community. The IAFE´s programs - from area-specific committees to monthly panel discussions to the Financial Engineer of the Year Award - are designed to provide its members with uniquely valuable activities to enhance their work in the field and opportunities to network and socialize with their colleagues.
About SunGard
SunGard is one of the world's leading software and IT services companies. SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries. SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.
With annual revenue exceeding $US5 billion, SunGard is ranked 435 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and services company on the Forbes list of private businesses. Based on information compiled by Datamonitor*, SunGard is the third largest provider of business applications software after Oracle and SAP. Continuity, Insurance & Risk has recognized SunGard as service provider of the year an unprecedented six times. For more information, please visit SunGard at www.sungard.com.
*January 2009 Technology Vendors Financial Database Tracker http://www.datamonitor.com
Trademark Information: SunGard and the SunGard logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.