Rate My Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.