Our founder, E. Robert Fernholz, PhD, served as Intech’s Chief Investment Officer from 1987-2011 and has subsequently been a consultant for the firm. He was born in 1941 in New Jersey. His father was a distinguished German chemist who fled Germany and immigrated to the U.S. in 1935 to join the faculty of Princeton University. Dr. Fernholz’s mother, Mary Briganti Fernholz, was the daughter of Italian Immigrants who came to the U.S. in the early 1900s. She held an M.S. degree in Economics from Smith College and worked at Princeton University as a research assistant in the Economics Department.Dr. Fernholz began his career as an academic mathematician at the University of Washington and later held various professorships at City University of New York, Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, and Princeton University. Fernholz left Princeton University in 1980 to become Research Director at Arbitrage Management Company. He also worked at Brignoli Models, where he worked alongside Dr. Harry Markowitz.
In 1987, Dr. Fernholz founded Intech, basing our mathematical investment process on a 1982 paper he published, “Stochastic Portfolio Theory and Stochastic Market Equilibrium.” He later elaborated on these mathematical methods in his monograph, Stochastic Portfolio Theory (Springer 2002). Dr. Fernholz is also the author of numerous research articles both in pure and applied mathematics as well as statistics and mathematics of finance.
