Faculty
Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the director of MIT's Laboratory for Financial Engineering. He is also a Principal Investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), an affiliated faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a member of the Operations Research Center (ORC) and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), all at MIT. He is also an external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, Santa FE, NM. He received his AM and PhD in economics from Harvard University, his BA in economics from Yale University, and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. He began his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where he was an Asistant and Associate Professor.
His current research spans several areas: evolutionary models of investor behavior and adaptive markets; systemic risk and financial regulation; quantitative models of financial markets; financial applications of machine-learning techniques and secure multi-party computation; healthcare finance; and deep-tech investing, including fusion energy and advanced manufacturing. Recent projects include:
An evolutionary model of asset prices based on the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis
New financing methods/ business models for accelerating biomedical innovation
Quantitative approaches to deep-tech investing
Applications of AI, especially machine learning and LLMs, to financial advice, “quantamental investing,” and healthcare finance
Lo has published extensively in academic journals (see http://alo.mit.edu) and his most recent book is The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis: An Evolutionary Approach to Understanding Financial System Dynamics. His awards include Sloan and Guggenheim Fellowships, the Paul A. Samuelson Award, the Harry M. Markowitz Award, the CFA Institute’s James R. Vertin Award, as well as election to Academia Sinica, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Finance Association, the Econometric Society, and TIME’s 2012 list of the “100 most influential people in the world.” His trade book Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought published in 2017 has also received a number of awards, listed here, and he has received multiple teaching awards from the University of Pennsylvania and MIT.
Lo is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research; a cofounder and board member of BridgeBio Pharma and Uncommon Cures; a cofounder of AlphaSimplex Group, QLS Advisors, QLS Technologies, Quantile Health, and Rutherford Energy Ventures; a board member of GCAR, n-Lorem, and Vesalius; and an investor in and advisor to a number of biotech companies and non-profit organizations. For a complete list of Lo’s affiliations and conflicts of interest disclosure, please click here.
Dai, Yuehao, Andrew W. Lo, Manish Singh, Qingyang Xu, and Ruixun Zhang. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. Forthcoming.
Thakor, Richard T. and Andrew W. Lo. Research Policy. Forthcoming. SSRN Preprint.
Li, Xuelin, Andrew W. Lo, and Richard Thakor. Review of Finance. Forthcoming. SSRN Preprint.
Shukla, Chinmay, Irwin Tendler, Neil Kumar, and Andrew W. Lo. Drug Discovery Today Vol. 31, No. 1 (2026): 104583. Download PDF.
Fengze Liu, Haoyu Wang, Joonhyuk Cho, Dan Roth, and Andrew W. Lo. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Suzhou, China: November 2025. Download PDF.
Ben Chaouch, Zied, Qingyang Xu, ... and Andrew W. Lo et al. Computers in Biology and Medicine Vol. 198, No. Part B (2025): 111150.
MIT Sloan professor Andrew Lo says Al is good at explaining trade-offs and exploring scenarios but weak at precise tax optimization, math, and regulatory compliance.
A new MIT Sloan executive education course led by professor Andrew W. Lo explores machine reasoning, quantamental investing, AI governance, and more.
"The problem that we have to solve is not whether AI has enough expertise," said professor Andrew W. Lo. "The answer right now is, clearly, AI has the financial expertise. What they don't have is that fiduciary duty. They don't have the ability to suffer consequences if they make a mistake to the same degree that a human advisor does." The notion of putting a client's interest ahead of yours "has no teeth" without responsibility or legal liability, he said.
Professor Andrew W. Lo and co-author wrote: "Across pharma and academia, an estimated 5,000+ shelved drug candidates were discontinued for reasons unrelated to safety or efficacy. Each represents a potential therapy for conditions that, in many cases, have no approved treatment at all. Industry stakeholders have a unique opportunity to collaborate on identifying these compounds. Aligning these assets with capable and motivated partners will benefit both drug developers and patients."
Professor Andrew W. Lo has described today's AI chatbots as the "digital equivalent of sociopaths." While the language may sound harsh, he describes them as smooth, persuasive and devoid of empathy. They can present both good and bad advice with the same confident tone.
The internet can be filled with unsympathetic commenters, criminals and terrible advice. Look for online groups that screen new members and have active moderators, suggested professor Andrew W. Lo.
This in-person course, led by MIT Professor Andrew W. Lo, provides a practical, executive-level exploration of how AI and machine learning are reshaping the financial industry. Participants will gain a foundational understanding of AI’s evolution—from early machine learning to the current LLM era—before diving into real-world applications across the buy side, sell side, banking, insurance, and risk management sectors. Through interactive sessions, case studies, and guest lectures from leading practitioners and researchers, executives will examine the capabilities and limitations of today’s AI tools and consider how emerging innovations will forge the next generation of FinTech.
The AI Adoption: Driving Business Value and Impact 6-week course from MIT Sloan equips you to move from AI awareness to AI transformation throughout your organization. You'll map AI technologies to your critical business challenges and opportunities, navigate adoption barriers, and build sustainable co-creation practices that amplify human capability rather than replace it.
