Troy, N.Y. – Chanaka Edirisinghe, a recognized leader in the areas of finance, quantitative finance, and management science, has been named the Kay and Jackson Tai ’72 Senior Professor in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. An endowed professorship is among the highest honors bestowed on a Rensselaer faculty member.

“We are very excited to welcome Professor Edirisinghe as the Kay and Jackson Tai ’72 Senior Professor in the Lally School,” said Thomas Begley, dean of the Lally School. “His strong research record, high-quality teaching, and expertise in quantitative finance will continue to enhance and shape our robust undergraduate and graduate programs in finance. In this role, he also will provide additional leadership and guidance to Lally School faculty and mentor our outstanding students studying in this field.” 

Edirisinghe joined the Rensselaer faculty in August 2014 from the University of Tennessee Knoxville, where he served as professor, Ph.D. director of the management science program, and director of the Financial Engineering Research Laboratory at the College of Business.

His research interests include financial portfolio optimization theory, models, and applications. Specific areas of his investigations include arbitrage-free pricing of options and derivatives, risk management, supply chain contracting and coordination, and fleet routing. His findings have been published in leading operations research and finance journals.

In addition, Edirisinghe is the developer of the financial trading strategy optimizer and simulator software Mi$OFT, and he often collaborates with industry partners on developing and implementing models for financial asset allocation and fundamental strength analysis of public firms for investments.

“The future global business landscape is going to be shaped by entrepreneurs with leadership in analytics, technology, and innovation,” said Edirisinghe. “I strongly believe Rensselaer provides tremendous opportunities in these areas for students, especially by building entrepreneurship across the university. It is truly an honor to be a part of the Rensselaer legacy, through the Lally School of Management, to contribute from my position of chaired professor in quantitative finance.”

Edirisinghe is the recipient of several honors, including the Citation of Excellence Award by Emerald Management Reviews in 2009 for writing one of the most prominent 50 articles in the world for management research. He also was recognized as a Distinguished Scholar at the School of Management at the Chinese University of Mining and Technology in Beijing in 2007.

In 2008, Edirisinghe served as a visiting research scholar at the Kansai University Faculty of Informatics in Osaka, Japan; and in 2010 a Visiting Erskine Fellow at the College of Business and Economics at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2014, he also served as a visiting professor of financial engineering at the Nanyang Business School of Nanyang Technical University (NTU) in Singapore.

Edirisinghe received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka, a master’s of engineering degree in industrial engineering and management from the Asian Institute of Technology, and a doctoral degree in management science from the University of British Columbia.

The Kay and Jackson Tai ’72 Senior Professor is supported by an endowment that was established in 2008 by Kay and Jackson Tai, a member of the Class of 1972, to encourage excellence in education at Rensselaer by allowing the Institute to attract and retain a faculty member with a distinguished international reputation. Jackson Tai serves as a member of the Rensselaer Board of Trustees. In addition, the Tai family is a member of the Stephen Van Rensselaer Society of Patroons.

As it approaches its bicentennial anniversary, the Institute continues to define The New Polytechnic, a new paradigm for teaching, learning, and research that uses advanced technologies to enable fresh collaborations across disciplines, sectors, and regions, in order to answer the global challenges of our day.

For more information about the Lally School of Management, visit: http://lallyschool.rpi.edu/.