Nov 03, 2009 - Claremont, Calif. -

The Harvey Mudd College Board of Trustees recently approved the appointment of new trustee Neil Chriss, mathematician, hedge fund manager, philanthropist and a founding board member of “Math for America.”

Chriss is managing principal and chief investment officer of Hutchin Hill Capital, a multi-strategy hedge fund. He was previously a managing director, head of quantitative strategies and a member of the operating committee at SAC Capital Management. Before joining SAC, he was founder and president of ICor Brokerage Inc., an electronic derivatives trading firm. Prior to ICor, Chriss was a portfolio manager in the Quantitative Strategies group at Goldman Sachs Asset Management in charge of volatility arbitrage strategies.

He started his career on Wall Street as a member of the Quantitative Research group at Morgan Stanley (1996-1998), where he developed models for equity program trading, prime brokerage and stock loan.

Chriss has published numerous influential research articles on quantitative trading, trade execution, portfolio optimization and risk management, and is the author of several books, including the best-selling finance text Black-Scholes and Beyond: Modern Options Pricing (McGraw Hill, 1996). Chriss’ 1998 paper “Optimal Execution of Portfolio Transactions” is widely credited as the theoretical model driving many of the algorithmic trading strategies on Wall Street.

Chriss is a founding board member of Math for America (2003-Present), a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve mathematics education in the United States. He is currently the executive director of the University of Chicago's Financial Mathematics Program and a member of the visiting committee of the University of Chicago's Physical Sciences Division. He is also a member of the governing board of the Mathematics in Finance Program at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

Chriss has a Ph.D. and a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, an M.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and has held academic positions in the mathematics departments of Harvard University, Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Toronto.