John is a cofounder of Quantstar and brings a wealth of experience in developing innovative and leading edge solutions in financial engineering. His areas of interests include problems in portfolio management and optimization, risk management, price modeling and, more to the point, problems in quantitative finance which defy cookie cutter solutions.
Professor Birge's work considers the design and analysis of practical systems in which some outcomes are not completely known before decisions must be made. He focuses on methods for making decisions that must be implemented sequentially over time. His research concerns the modeling of these systems to obtain robust decisions that are not just optimal for a single criterion but that respond favorably to whatever outcomes occur. His work concentrates on asset/liability management, low discrepancy sequences for option pricing, and real option investment evaluation.
In the course of his distinguished career, he has held visiting appointments at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, Austria, the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Professor Birge has worked for and been a consultant to a number of organizations including Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, General Motors, Chrysler Corporation, Volkswagen, Detroit Edison, Herman Miller, TRW, Schlumberger, the Michigan State Senate, the Michigan State Police Troopers Association, and the Comision de Regulacion de Energia y Gas in Colombia.
John received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in Operations Research. His A.B. is from Princeton University in Mathematics. After having held various positions at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Northwestern University and University of Michigan (where he established the Financial Engineering Program), he joined the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business as Professor of Operations Management and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow in July 2004.
He is currently on the National Academy of Engineering-Institute of Medicine Committee on Engineering and Health Care. He is author of two books and more than seventy refereed publications in a variety of journals.