Cornell is the birthplace of modern financial engineering. The first academic meeting on the subject was held here on May 29, 1989. Robert Jarrow and David Heath began advising students before formally launching the program in 1995, making Cornell one of the first universities to offer a financial engineering degree. In 2007, ORIE expanded the program to include a third semester in New York City, founding Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan (CFEM). This extension further emphasized the program’s practical, hands-on approach through direct interaction with practitioners and industry-sponsored projects.
Structured to offer a flexible curriculum, the program allows students to focus on a career track of their choice. Some of the most popular career tracks include:
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Trading
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Quantitative portfolio management
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Financial data science/fintech
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Financial risk management
Placement Information
While the majority of our students have firm post-graduation plans by the time they graduate in the middle of December, some will find new job offers within the first months of the new year.
Many new opportunities become available between February and May of the following year, and CFEM works closely with newly-minted alumni and recruiters to ensure high placement rates within 6-9 months after graduation.
CFEM Faculty and Staff
CFEM Practitioners
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![Todd Edmonds]()
Todd Edmonds
Visiting Lecturer, Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan Senior Option Trader, Citadel Securities
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![Alexander Fleiss]()
Alexander Fleiss
Visiting Lecturer, Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder, Rebellion Research
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Announcing the New CFEM Alumni Council
We are excited to announce the formation of the CFEM Alumni Council. More than a dozen alumni stepped up to help plan and lead future events that bring together current students and program graduates. The Council’s first event in September, a Round Robin networking session, brought back alumni from 2014 onwards for interactive discussions on systematic macro, high-frequency trading, and portfolio management.
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![CFEM alumni talking with current CFEM students.]()
Thank You to Our CFEM Alumni Community!
As the 2025-26 academic year comes to a close, we want to extend a sincere thank you to the CFEM alumni community.
The coming year will mark two important milestones for Financial Engineering at Cornell: 30 years since the first cohort of ORIE M.Eng. Financial Engineering students graduated in 1996, and 20 years since CFEM graduated its first class in 2008. As we begin planning anniversary celebrations, we look forward to highlighting the alumni, students, faculty, staff, careers, and community that have grown out of this program.
Your support touches every part of CFEM and every stage of our students’ experience. Alumni volunteer for mock interviews, connect students with industry, teach at CFEM, sponsor capstone projects, and advise us on new trends shaping financial engineering and quantitative finance. Your involvement is invaluable.
This year, we initiated the formation of the CFEM Alumni Council, with Angie Wang (CFEM ’17) and Elijah Huang (CFEM ’18) serving as the first co-chairs. The Council now includes more than 15 alumni and gives alumni a more formal role in shaping and strengthening the CFEM community. It has already helped launch two new programs this year: the fall Round Robin and virtual mentoring for our Ithaca students in the spring. We hope these will grow into flagship CFEM alumni programs, and we are already planning more.
Building on this momentum, we hope the coming years will bring alumni even closer to one another through CFEM. We are speaking with alumni, gathering ideas, and developing events and programs that will continue to strengthen the close-knit ties that have always made this community special.
Thank you for being such an important part of the fabric of CFEM!
News
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Spain honors Cornell Engineering professor with knighthood
Professor Marcos López de Prado received the Officer’s Cross of the Royal Order of Civil Merit, which represents a knighthood and one of Spain’s highest honors, for his distinguished services to science.
Contact
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Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan
607-254-9700 ext. 54480