FACULTY
FULL TIME FACULTY
 Charles Tapiero
Chairman and Founder of the Department of Finance and Risk Engineering
Program Director, Financial Engineering Programs
Ph.D. New York University, 1970
Tel: 718.260.3653
Office: RH 517E
Fax: 718.260.3355
E-mail: ctapiero@poly.edu
Dr. Charles S. Tapiero, is the Morton L. Topfer Chair and Distinguished Professor of Financial Engineering and Technology Management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He is an active researcher and consultant in Risk, Technology, Computational Finance and Economics, Industry, Insurance and Financial Risk Management. He is currently the Co Chief Editor of Risk and decision Analysis as well as a member of Editorial Boards of a number of journals. Professor Tapiero has published 13 Books and Over two hundred and Fifty papers on a broad range of issues spanning risk management, stochastic modeling and applied stochastic control in finance-insurance, in technology, operations and environmental related problems. His most recent books include "Applied Stochastic Models and Control in Finance and Insurance, Kluwer Academic Press, April 1998", The Management and the Control of Quality, Chapman and Hall, 1996, "Risk and Financial Management: Mathematical and Computational Methods”, March 2004, John Wiley and Supply Chain Risks Games (with K. Kogan) (Springer, 2007). Currently Professor Tapiero is working on two Books: Assets Pricing and Extraordinary Risks as well as “Risk and Quality: The Convergence”.
Professor Tapiero has assumed numerous positions both in leading academic institutions in the US (Columbia University, University of Washington, Case Western Reserve University), in Israel (The Hebrew University and Bar Ilan University) as well as in Europe. In addition, Professor Tapiero has been a member of Board of large Industrial Corporations and had an active public life at the highest echelons
Nassim Taleb
Chairman and Founder of the Department of Finance and Risk Engineering
Program Director, Financial Engineering Programs
Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, the Department of Finance and Risk Engineering
Ph.D. University of Paris, (Paris 9 Dauphine, Management Science)
MBA, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Tel: 718.260.3599
Office: RH 517G
Fax: 718.260.3355
Website: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com
CV: Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb_CV.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 20 years as a derivatives trader and "quant" before starting a full-time career as a scholar of applied probability and risk management. He is known for a "multidisciplinary but no-nonsense" approach to model error and the role of high-impact rare events ("black swans"). Taleb's current program is to build rules of decision-making under incomplete information and to identify unreliable theories and models and shield individuals and society from them ("how to live in a world we don't understand").
Taleb is currently Visiting Professor at the London Business School and co-director of the Decision Science Laboratory focusing on errors in the estimation of remote events. He was the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and, for 8 years, taught derivatives model errors at the Courant Institute of New York University. Before becoming a researcher, he held senior derivatives positions with major institutions: Credit Suisse First Boston, UBS, BNP-Paribas, Indosuez (now Calyon), Bankers Trust (now Deutsche Bank). He also worked as an independent pit trader in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and ran his own derivatives firm for 6 years. Taleb has also advised central banks and various government agencies on security, model risk, and risk management. He currently is the principal of a hedge fund and member of the board of several institutions.
Taleb holds an MBA from the Wharton School and a PhD from the University of Paris. He is the author of two essays on randomness and a technical clinical book on derivatives: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) and Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2001, 2005), and Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options (1997).
His books have more than 1.4 million copies and 51 translations in print. The Black Swan has been the highest selling essay in the world in 2007 and 2008. Taleb has 2 of the top 10 research papers on Social Science Research Network for 2008.
 Philip Maymin
Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering
PH.D.,University of Chicago Graduate School of Business
Tel: 718.260.3175
Fax: 718.260.3355
Office: RH 517C
E-mail: phil@maymin.com
Website: http://www.philmaymin.com
Dr. Philip Maymin has more than a decade of both theoretical and practical financial expertise. He was a portfolio manager at Long-Term Capital Management, Ellington Management Group, and his own hedge fund, Maymin Capital Management, which focused on behavioral relative value strategies. He has traded equity and equity derivatives, high yield bonds, emerging markets, convertible bond arbitrage, volatility arbitrage, statistical arbitrage strategies, multiple share classes and other fundamentally linked pairs, and exotic derivatives.
He holds a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Chicago, a Master's in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Bachelor's in Computer Science from Harvard University. His 2007 dissertation on "Self-Imposed Limits to Arbitrage" proposed a behavioral solution both to the long-standing pricing puzzle of fundamentally linked stocks as well as a solution to the previously unknown volume puzzle.
He has also developed the smallest possible deterministic model of complexity in financial security prices and he has introduced the first formalized quantum programming language.
He is also an award-winning journalist, a Policy Scholar for the Yankee Institute for Public Policy, a Justice of the Peace, a columnist for the Fairfield County Weekly, and the author of Yankee Wake Up. He was also the 2006 Libertarian candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in Connecticut's fourth Congressional district.
 Barry Blecherman
Industry Associate Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering
Ph.D., Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Tel: 718.260.3398
Fax: 718.260.3355
Office: RH 517F
E-mail: blecherman@poly.edu
CV: Barry_Blecherman_CV.pdf
Professor Blecherman has served Polytechnic as the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education and by creating and directing new courses, certificates, and degree programs. He is proud to have been asked to join the faculty of the new Department of Finance and Risk Engineering and will be deeply involved in expanding the economics offerings of the Financial Engineering program and in helping to diversify the programmatic portfolio of the FRE Department.
After several years as an engineer and entrepreneur in information systems consulting, Professor Blecherman returned to the academic world at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Decision Sciences. He joined the faculty of Polytechnic Institute of NYU in 1994. His interests lie in the management science, behavioral decision theory and behavioral economics, information economics and strategy, game theory, and negotiations.
Professor Blecherman has been involved in classified work for U.S. Navy computer operating systems on AEGIS class cruisers, financial processing systems for a large bank, and many other technical projects. His experience includes project and technical management, business strategy, marketing, and computer systems management. He has consulted to start-up firms and Fortune 500 companies in areas of economic strategy, pricing, negotiations, and competitive analysis.
Research Interest
- Quantitative aspects of management science
- Information economics and strategy
- Game theory
- Judgment bias in managerial decisions
Fred Novomestky
Industry Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering
B.S., University of Puerto Rico
M.S., Ph.D, Polytechnic Institute of NYU
Tel: 718.260.3436
Fax: 718.260.3355
Office: RH 517H
E-mail: fnovomes@poly.edu
After receiving his Ph.D. in 1982, he continued his relationship with Polytechnic by assisting with the task of redesigning the Management Information System graduate program. He then continued teaching part-time for Polytechnic in 1983. Fred returned to part-time teaching in 1996 at Polytechnic focusing on the quantitative courses such as business statistics. He also teaches courses in portfolio optimization and risk management for the Center for Finance and Technology. From 1973 to 1996, Fred worked for the Chase Manhattan Bank and Chase Investors Management Corporation as Vice President responsible for Financial Engineering and Investment Product Research and Development. Before that, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he performed system engineering studies of military defense components, including ballistic trajectory estimation algorithms and phased array radars.
Fred brings over twenty-six years of experience in information technology development, investment and risk management product R&D, and client advisory work to NYU-Poly. He has developed and managed these business solutions across a wide range of hardware platforms using a variety of software tools.
Research Interests:
Fred's research interests center on object-oriented numerical methods and evolutionary computation algorithms applied to business optimization problems, systems with distributed objects and quantitative investment strategy. He recently completed a study entitled "A Dynamic, Globally-Diversified, Index Neutral Synthetic Asset Allocation Strategy" which has been accepted for publication in Management Sciences. His most recent publication is entitled "Replication of Long-Term with Short-Term Options" which he co-authored with K.S. Choie and appeared in the Winter 1989 issue of the Journal of Portfolio Management.
Tel: 718.260.3867
Office: RH 517i
Fax: 718.260.3355
E-mail: speterbu@poly.edu
Web page: http://faculty.poly.edu/~speterbu/
Professor Peterburgsky's research interests are in corporate finance. He teaches "Corporate Finance and Financial Markets" in the undergraduate Minor in Finance.
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Full time Faculty 
