The affiliation, stated exactly
The Institute's affiliation with Carnegie Mellon University
The Institute is in academic affiliation with Carnegie Mellon University. It was founded by three faculty members who teach or have taught at Carnegie Mellon University, all three of them at the university when the Institute was founded. Carnegie Mellon students have completed part of their degree course at the Institute, set and assessed by its faculty.
The faculty
Every course the Institute offers is planned and written by its three founding faculty, and each of them teaches or has taught at Carnegie Mellon University.
- Prof. Patrick McSharry is a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University Africa. He works on forecasting, machine learning and risk, and spent twenty-two years at the University of Oxford.
- Prof. Ben Racz is Professor of the Practice at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering, where he teaches Advanced Quantitative Finance and Algorithmic Trading.
- Prof. Martin Saint taught and researched at Carnegie Mellon University’s Africa campus from 2013 to 2023, where he introduced the continent’s first academic courses in financial technology and blockchain.
Their full records are on the faculty page.
The students
Carnegie Mellon students have completed part of their degree course at the Institute. The work was set and supervised by the Institute’s faculty, who assessed it alongside the university, and it ran on the same questions of trading, risk and market data that the Institute’s courses teach. The Institute is a place where Carnegie Mellon’s own students earn part of their degree.
Research
The three faculty also work together on research in quantitative finance. Papers that meet the Institute’s standard appear in its Working Paper series, described on the research page.
What the affiliation means
The affiliation runs through people and through teaching. All three founders were members of the Carnegie Mellon faculty when they founded the Institute, and two teach there today. Carnegie Mellon students have earned part of their degree through work done at the Institute, under the Institute’s faculty. The Institute is a separate body with its own name, its own faculty and its own awards, and it is not one of the university’s schools or departments.
The Institute’s awards
Certificates, the two Diplomas and the Fellowship are awards of the Institute, issued by the Institute under its own name and verified by its credentials office. They are professional credentials. The Institute is not an accredited body, and its awards are not academic degrees. Carnegie Mellon University does not issue a degree, a diploma or any other award for these courses, and enrolling at the Institute does not enrol a student at the university.
This page forms part of the terms of enrolment.