Eugene Fama

Nobel laureate, Dimensional Director, and Consultant

“In poring over statistical work, we try to document whether it’s really systematic or just a chance result. It’s like an ongoing crime scene, where you’re always learning stuff.”

Eugene F. Fama, 2013 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, is the principal scholar whose groundbreaking work inspired the founding of Dimensional. Widely recognized as the “father of modern finance,” Professor Fama developed the efficient market hypothesis. He is a Dimensional Director and serves on the firm’s Investment Research Committee. Professor Fama has written two books and published more than 100 articles in academic journals. His paper “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns,” coauthored with Kenneth R. French, won the 1992 Smith Breeden Prize for the best paper in the Journal of Finance. And his paper “Market Efficiency, Long-Term Returns, and Behavioral Finance” won the 1998 Fama-DFA Prize for the best paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics in the areas of capital markets and asset pricing.

Professor Fama received the Fred Arditti Innovation Award from the CME Center for Innovation in 2007. He was also the first recipient of three major prizes for research in finance: the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics in 2005, the Morgan Stanley American Finance Association Award for Excellence in Finance in 2007, and the Onassis Prize in Finance in 2009. His other awards include the 1982 Chaire Francqui (Belgian National Science Prize) and the 2006 Nicholas Molodovsky Award from the CFA Institute.

Professor Fama was the first elected fellow of the American Finance Association in 2001 and is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also an advisory editor of the Journal of Financial Economics and chairman of the Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Professor Fama earned a bachelor's degree from Tufts University and an MBA and PhD from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1964. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1963. He has been awarded a doctor of law degree from the University of Rochester; a doctor of law degree from DePaul University; a doctor honoris causa from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium; and a doctor of science honoris causa from Tufts.