Iafe names Boyle as financial engineer of the year

The International Association of Financial Engineers (Iafe) has selected Phelim Boyle as its financial engineer of the year. Boyle, scientific director of the Institute for Quantitative Finance and Insurance at the University of Waterloo, is credited with pioneering the use of financial engineering techniques in actuarial science with the pricing and risk management of complex long-term options in insurance contracts.

Iafe said his work on integrating the different techniques used in innovative derivatives products and traditional insurance markets was significant, and had contributed to the growing overlap between the two sectors.

"He has produced a remarkable number of contributions to the field of financial engineering, over a long career. His seminal papers applying Monte Carlo techniques and high-dimensional lattice methods to practical problems provide a foundation for much of the work financial engineers perform," said Iafe chairman Richard Lindsey.

Boyle co-authored a technical article, Risk and Probability Measures, in Risk, July 2002, with Tak Kuen Siu and Hailiang Yang.

Previous winners of the award include Oldrich Vasicek, Darrell Duffie, Jonathan Ingersoll, Andrew Lo, Emanuel Derman, John Hull, John Cox, Robert Merton, Fischer Black, Mark Rubinstein, Stephen Ross and Robert Jarrow.