Renowned economist Robert Merton rejoins MIT faculty
Bloomberg Businessweek
June 12, 2010
Robert C. Merton, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in economics, said he will rejoin the faculty of the Massachusetts of Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management to focus on training students in quantitative finance.
Merton, 65, will teach in Sloan’s Master of Finance program, which was launched last year, Cambridge, Massachusetts- based MIT said today in a statement. He will retire from Harvard Business School at the end of this month after 22 years, he said.
MIT, led by President Susan Hockfield, is poised to help shape the world’s financial infrastructure after the economic crisis that began in 2008, Merton said in the statement. He will retain his association with Harvard, also in Cambridge, as an emeritus professor.
“There’s a much greater need for people who understand complicated financial instruments and models,” Merton said today in a telephone interview. “The financial crisis has brought it to the fore. There’s no financial institution in the world that can function without them. It’s an issue of using them properly and understanding them.”
