Marcos López de Prado, professor of practice in Cornell Duffield College of Engineering and a pioneer in financial machine learning, has been elected an international member of Spain’s Royal Academy of Engineering (Real Academia de Ingeniería), one of the nation’s highest scientific distinctions.
The lifetime appointment recognizes López de Prado’s pioneering contributions to computational science and financial machine learning over a career spanning three decades. His election places him among a select group of 71 international members, whose ranks include Nobel laureates, Turing Award recipients and members of leading national academies around the world.
Founded by Royal Decree, the Royal Academy of Engineering serves as Spain’s national academy for engineering. The academy provides independent technical expertise to government and public institutions, advances engineering research and innovation, and promotes engineering knowledge for the public good. Membership is limited and granted only through nomination by existing members, review by the academy’s admissions board and election by an absolute majority vote of the academy.
López de Prado joined Cornell in 2015 and teaches financial machine learning in the Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan program. Beyond Cornell, he serves as Global Head of Quantitative Research and Development at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, is a research fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and is a founding board member of ADIA Lab, Abu Dhabi’s research center for computational and data sciences.
The academy cited López de Prado’s role in establishing financial machine learning as a rigorous discipline that combines engineering, computational science, statistics and investment practice. His research has helped introduce engineering methods and artificial intelligence into modern financial decision-making, with techniques that are now widely adopted across the global investment industry.
“Professor López de Prado’s election acknowledges his central role in pioneering engineering methods that solve complex financial problems, as well as his development of machine learning algorithms now deployed across the global investment industry,” said Jaime Domínguez Abascal, president of Spain’s Royal Academy of Engineering. “His work bridges academia and practice, demonstrating how engineering principles and methods can enhance high-stakes decision-making in domains of broad economic, societal and institutional importance.”
For López de Prado, the honor reflects the growing recognition of engineering approaches to finance.
“I am grateful to Spain’s Royal Academy of Engineering, whose members exemplify scientific and technological excellence around the world,” López de Prado said. “Engineering is not limited to physical artifacts—it is the disciplined design of solutions to technical problems under real-world constraints. Financial machine learning applies engineering methods to one of society’s most complex systems: global financial markets. I am honored that the Academy embraces this vision, and I hope my election inspires future generations to pursue engineering approaches to finance for the advancement of knowledge and the benefit of society.”
The recognition builds on another major honor López de Prado received from the Spanish government in 2024, when King Felipe VI appointed him Knight Officer of the Royal Order of Civil Merit in recognition of his distinguished services to science and the global investment industry.
At Cornell, López de Prado’s impact extends beyond his research. His courses consistently draw strong interest from students seeking to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to quantitative finance, bringing together theoretical foundations with real-world industry experience.
“Professor López de Prado’s election as an international member of Spain’s Royal Academy of Engineering reflects the growing global importance of the field he has helped shape, and of the role AI and emerging technologies are playing in the future of financial markets,” said Victoria Averbukh, director of Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering. “It is thrilling that, year after year, Marcos brings his innovative thinking, intellectual rigor, and practical perspective directly to our students, teaching one of the most popular courses in our program.”
López de Prado is expected to receive the academy’s medal and diploma on October 6th during the investiture ceremony that will take place at Madrid’s historic Palace of Villafranca, headquarters of the Royal Academy of Engineering.