Stephen A. Ross is Co-chairman of Roll and Ross Asset Management Corporation (Roll and Ross), a partner in IVC International Limited (IVC), and the Franco Modigliani Professor of Finance and Economics at MIT. He was previously the Sterling Professor of Economics and Finance at Yale University and, before that, a professor of economics and finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Ross is the author of more than 100 articles in economics and finance and is the coauthor of a series of introductory textbooks in finance. He received his B.S. with honors from CalTech in 1965 where he majored in physics, and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1970. While he has worked on a wide variety of topics in economics and finance, he is probably best known for having invented the Arbitrage Pricing Theory and the Theory of Agency, and as the co-discoverer of risk neutral pricing and of the binomial model for pricing derivatives. Models developed by him and coworkers, including term structure models and option pricing models, are now standards for pricing in major securities trading firms. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Graham and Dodd Award for financial writing, the Pomerance Prize for excellence in the area of options research, the University of Chicago´s Leo Melamed Prize for the best research by a business school professor and the 1996 IAFE Financial Engineer of the Year Award. A Fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he currently serves as an Associate Editor of several economics and finance journals and in 1988 was President of the American Finance Association.