Eugene Fama: economist, professor

Arguably the best-known financial economist in the world, Eugene Fama helped write the book on modern finance.

While an undergraduate at Tufts, Fama began his academic career as a major in Romance Languages. Attracted to the excitement of finance, Fama switched majors and graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics.

A tenured professor at the University of Chicago before he was 30 years old, Fama began teaching modern portfolio theory in the 1960s at the University of Chicago before modern finance was an established field.

His doctoral thesis, "The Behavior of Stock Market Prices," took up an entire issue of the University's esteemed Journal of Business. A simplified version of this paper titled "Random Walks in Stock Market Prices" eventually would be published in Institutional Investor and its significance rippled throughout the investment industry far beyond the halls of academia.

From the moment that Fama stepped into the academic scene, his work raised the eyebrows of finance professors and investment professionals alike and continues to do so thirty years later. The London newspaper The Independent described Fama as one of the world's "outstanding young financial economists," and the Boston Globe cited him as a possible contender for a Nobel Prize.

Currently, Fama is professor of finance at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, where he is also chairman of its Center for Research in Security Prices. In addition to his academic post, Fama is director of research at Dimensional Fund Advisors, who have based several of their investment products on his findings.

Information for this biography courtesy of Ibbotson and Index Funds Advisors -- www.ifa.tv.

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