Speaker Bio
Prof. Luis Seco is the Director of the Mathematical Finance Program, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto and director of Risklab, a university research laboratory established in 1996, conducting research in quantitative finance, with special focus on asset management. Prof. Seco’s current activity is focused on sustainability, including climate risk, and is simultaneously the Chair of the Centre for Sustainable Development at the Fields Institute, and affiliate Faculty member at the Vector Institute for research in Machine Learning; Prof. Seco’s core activity is bringing artificial intelligence into today’s sustainability challenges to build a new better world for future. He has authored papers in artificial intelligence and environmental scores, and currently is expanding that work to analyze CO2 emissions and carbon trades using machine learning. He was appointed ADIALab Fellow in 2022.
His expertise has been in developing University-Industry relationships, which he has done since 1996. In October 2007, he won the NSERC – Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada -Synergy Award for Innovation for his achievements. In 2011 was admitted Caballero de la Orden del Mérito Civil (Knight of the Order of Civil Merit), an award from the Government of Spain for his application of mathematics to foresee economic cycles
He was a co-founder and CEO Sigma Analysis & Management Ltd., an asset management firm that invested institutional money in liquid alternative investments for twenty years.
Today, Prof. Seco business partners include several International pension and sovereign wealth funds, the FIT Centre, RiskLab Centre Inc., Metaversitas Inc. and JUMP S.a.r.l., to address challenges and achieve an innovation agenda. His vision is to leverage the University network worldwide to promote training and research broadly in the areas where technology and innovation joins finance bringing them together, including education, climate risk and sustainability.
Luis Seco ’s career started at Princeton University in 1985, and landed at the University of Toronto in 1992 after a short stay at the California Institute of Technology. Today, he holds adjunct appointments at Renmin University in Beijing, Florida International University, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Zurich and Kutaisi International University.