Engle, who holds the Michael Armellino Professorship in the Management of Financial Services, was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economics for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility (ARCH). Engle shared the prize with Clive W. J. Granger of the University of California at San Diego. Engle has published more than 100 academic papers and three books. His interest in financial econometrics covers equities, interest rates, exchange rates, and options. Engle was an assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1969-74. He moved to the University of California, San Diego in 1975, becoming an associate professor and then a full professor in 1977. He was chair of the Department of Economics from 1990 to 1994. He now lectures widely to both academic and practitioner audiences. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the American Finance Association, and the American Statistical Association. Engle received a B.A. in physics from Williams College as well as a masters degree in physics and a Ph.D. in economics, both from Cornell University.
Ruth Lehmann, Ph.D., a leader in the field of developmental genetics, is the Julius Raynes Professor of Developmental Genetics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. She is also director of the new Helen & Martin S. Kimmel Center for Stem Cell Biology and director of the Developmental Genetics Program at the Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at the School of Medicine. Lehmann is widely known for her pioneering work on germ cells, which give rise to egg and sperm, during early development of the embryo. By studying aberrant development of mutant germ cell lines in the fruit fly, her research has laid the foundation for understanding the potential causes of testicular germ-line cancers and sterility. Lehmann received her Ph.D. from the University of Tubingen, Germany, and she joined the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988, where she continued her research on the molecular genetics and biochemistry of development. In 1996, she joined NYU School of Medicine's Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, where she and Alexandra Joyner, Ph.D., professor of cell biology and physiology and neuroscience, coordinate the research program in developmental genetics.
Margaret Wright, whose department is part of NYU's world-renowned Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, is a leading researcher in the fields of optimization, linear algebra, and scientific applications. One of NYU's esteemed Silver Professors, Wright is the 16th active or retired Courant faculty member in NAS. After 13 years at Bell Laboratories, where she became head of its Scientific Computing Research Department in 1997, Wright came to NYU in 2002 as chair of the Computer Science Department. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. She served during 1995 and 1996 as president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). She has served on advisory committees for the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the National Science Foundation and the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research at the Department of Energy. She is the co-author of two books, Practical Optimization and Numerical Linear Algebra and Optimization. Wright obtained her B.S. in mathematics, and M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science, from Stanford University.