Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the Retired Distinguished Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at New York University Tandon School of Engineering. He holds a PhD from the University of Paris and an MBA from the Wharton School. Taleb spent more than 20 years as a derivatives trader specializing in hedging nonlinear risks and managing payoffs under complicated probability distributions, holding senior positions at major financial institutions including Bankers Trust (now Deutsche Bank), UBS, CS First Boston, Indosuez (now Calyon), BNP-Paribas, and Empirica Capital LLC, as well as working as an independent pit trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and running his own derivatives firm for six years. After 2005, he began a full-time career in research focused on risk management and applied probability. His academic appointments include Fellow in the Math Finance Program and Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences from December 1999 to December 2005, Dean's Professor of Decision Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from January 2005 to January 2006, and Visiting Research Professor at London Business School from December 2007 to January 2009. Taleb has advised heads of states, U.S. agencies, and international organizations on risk-based policy making, particularly model error and the detection and mitigation of tail exposures, and testified before the United States Congress on two occasions.

Taleb's research specializations include risk, tail risk, quantitative finance, and applied probability. He is the author of the five-volume Incerto essay on uncertainty—Antifragile, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, The Bed of Procrustes, and Skin in the Game (2001-2012)—as well as Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options (1997, New York: John Wiley & Sons) and the freely available technical book The Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails, a reexpression of the Incerto in applied probability theory. He has authored more than 65 scholarly papers across various aspects of risk and probability. Taleb's works have over 120 translations in 35 languages. His major awards and honors include listing among the Bloomberg 50 most influential persons in finance (2011), recognition as one of the 25 most influential graduates of the Wharton School, the Wolfram Award for Innovation granted by Stephen Wolfram for contributions to computational probability, and numerous honorary doctorates.