I was born and raised in Athens, Greece. I received my Diploma (a 5-year degree) from the Electrical and Computer Engineering School of the National University of Athens, Greece in June 1991. Just before I graduated I got a phone call from Prof. Bertsimas inviting me to join the ORC. And I did arrive in Boston in August 1991 and never left 🙂

I graduated from MIT in 1995 with a Ph.D. from the ORC. My research dealt with queueing networks, developing distributional law approaches.  I published a number of papers and I got the Second Place in the INFORMS George Nicholson Student Paper Competition in 1996 (a year before my husband – a LIDS student – got the exact same prize).

I am currently the CEO of Dynamic Ideas Financial, a financial technology company and a SEC registered internet advisor and a partner at Alpha Dynamics LLC, a registered independent advisor.

After graduating from MIT, I stayed one year as a post-doc and worked on Financial Engineering. At the time I was consulting for asset management companies and in 1999 I co-founded (with Dimitris) Dynamic Ideas and then sold the assets of the company to Amex. From 2002-2010 I was a member of the quantitative asset management group of Amex and then Ameriprise/RiverSource. I left in 2010, when I was a senior portfolio manager, and started Dynamic Ideas Financial and Alpha Dynamics.

The ORC (and before that the Engineering school) uniquely prepares students not only to understand the beautiful theory of optimization and stochastic systems but also to engage in real world applications. I have been using all the tools that I learned from ORC every day in my work, and often times in my family life. I love the ORC approach that every challenge is an opportunity for a well-designed and executed solution.

My memory of the ORC is that of a warm, multicultural, inclusive place. I have friends, older and younger, who studied at MIT and remember it as a hard place but the ORC was really a fun, friendly place to be. Our first Thanksgiving in the US we had no friends or family outside the people we have met at MIT and one of my classmates from the center, Alan Kaufman, invited all of us to spend the day with his family. It was such a kind act and it represented the spirit of the ORC community.