Andrew Lo

Andrew Lo

Director, MIT Lab for Financial Engineering

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 is also a Principal Investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), an affiliated faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a member of the Operations Research Center (ORC) and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), all at MIT.

He is also an external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa FE, NM. He received his A.M. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, his B.A. in economics from Yale University, and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. He began his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he was an assistant and associate professor.

His current research spans several 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; healthcare finance; and deep-tech investing, including fusion energy and advanced manufacturing. Recent projects include:

  • An evolutionary model of asset prices based on the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis
  • New financing methods/ business models for accelerating biomedical innovation
  • Quantitative approaches to deep-tech investing
  • Applications of AI, especially machine learning and LLMs, to financial advice, “quantamental investing,” and healthcare finance

Lo has published extensively in academic journals (see http://alo.mit.edu) and his most recent book is The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis: An Evolutionary Approach to Understanding Financial System Dynamics. 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 American Finance Association, the Econometric Society, and TIME’s 2012 list of the “100 most influential people in the world.” His trade book Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought published in 2017 has also received a number of awards, listed here, and he has received multiple teaching awards from the University of Pennsylvania and MIT.

Lo is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research; a co-founder and board member of BridgeBio Pharma and Uncommon Cures; a co-founder of AlphaSimplex Group, QLS Advisors, QLS Technologies, Quantile Health, and Rutherford Energy Ventures; a board member of GCAR, n-Lorem, and Vesalius; and an investor in and advisor to a number of biotech companies and non-profit organizations. For a complete list of Lo’s affiliations and conflicts of interest disclosure, please click here.