News: ORIE

M.Eng. student honored by Jamaican Prime Minister

By: Chris Dawson

Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan (CFEM) student Tashae Bowes recently received the Prime Minister’s National Youth Award for Excellence from Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness. Bowes is one of 21 Jamaicans under the age of 30 to be chosen for the honor this year. Bowes was awarded in the category of “Academics” and was nervous at the ceremony. “All of the nominees who made it to the short list were invited,” Bowes said. “But we did not know who the awardees would be until that moment when they announced our names.” The awards ceremony took place on April 20, 2024 on the lawns at... Read more

Merrill Scholars honor mentors who inspired them

At a luncheon on May 21, 42 Merrill Scholars celebrated the mentors who had the greatest influence on their early education and the Cornell faculty or staff members who contributed most significantly to their college experience. Read more

Three faculty members elected AAAS fellows

Cornell faculty members Ailong Ke, David Shmoys and Martin T. Wells have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. Read more

ORIE junior wins Goldwater Scholarship

By: Chris Dawson

ORIE third-year student Kiran Chandrasekher ’25 has won a 2024 Goldwater Scholarship. The Goldwater Scholarship is one of the most competitive scholarships offered to undergraduates in the US pursuing careers in mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. For a student to be considered for the Goldwater Scholarship, which honors former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, their name must be put forth by their undergraduate institution. This year, 446 academic institutions nominated 1,353 science, engineering, and math students. Of this group of nominees, 438 were chosen as 2024 Goldwater... Read more

David Williamson appointed next ORIE director

David Williamson has been appointed as the next Director of the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE). In addition to his role as a professor in ORIE, Williamson is also a professor and recently served as chair in the Department of Information Science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. He will begin his three-year term on January 1, 2025, upon return from sabbatical leave. Adrian Lewis, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering and a previous ORIE Director, has agreed to lead the school in an interim capacity for a six... Read more

CFEM Faculty Marcos Lopez de Prado Receives Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award

Lopez de Prado's article, "Where are the Factors in Factor Investing?" was published in The Journal of Portfolio Management and identifies a significant logical inconsistency within the factor investing literature. It was recognized for its critical examination of the econometric approaches used in factor investing studies. He argues that while factor models are intended to have a causal interpretation, researchers virtually never justify their model specification choices in causal terms, hence the question “where are the factors in factor investing?” This oversight leads to misspecified... Read more

Six early-career professors win NSF development awards

Researchers studying large-scale artificial intelligence, microbial biomanufacturing and causal inference methods are among the Cornell researchers who recently received National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Awards. Read more

Cornell ORIE hosting "Alphathon" quant competition

The competition is a chance for students who are interested in exploring a career in quant—which is the design and implementation of complex models that allow financial firms to price and trade securities—to compete against others and showcase their skills. Students who register for the competition will be given access to WorldQuant’s web-based simulation platform called BRAIN, which holds more than 50,000 data points competitors can access to build their models. You can register for the Cornell Alphathon competition here. Cornell was asked to host this Alphathon competition based in part on... Read more