Evan Picoult '86

Professor Picoult teaches the Risk Management course, which is currently offered in a joint Master of Science degree program of the DRO department of the Business School and the IEOR department of the School of Engineering and Science. In 2018 Picoult retired as managing director of Citi, where he had worked for 38 years. He had been the head of Citi’s Economic Capital and Stress Testing Methodology unit and served on a number of firm-wide risk governance committees.

Picoult has a PhD in experimental particle physics from Columbia. He also did post-doctoral research on visual perception and was an assistant professor in Columbia’s Psychology department.

Picoult joined Citibank in 1980 in IT. He worked on a trading desk, trading interest rate derivatives, beginning in 1986. From 1988 until his retirement in 2018 he worked in risk analytics, within Citi’s risk management department. He managed risk analytic teams that were responsible for developing and implementing methods to measure market risk, wholesale credit risk, counterparty credit risk, model validation, and economic capital. During his last fifteen years at Citi, Picoult focused on firm-wide risk projects for all forms of risk, including economic capital, stress testing, and regulatory capital.

Picoult is on the Advisory Board of the IAQF (International Association of Quantitative Finance). For over twenty years he worked very actively on Basel regulatory issues as a member of several international and US trade associations’ working groups, and he was the North American co-chair of ISDA’s (International Swap and Derivatives Association) Risk Management Committee from the mid-1990’s until 2010. For several years, until 2008, he was also on the board of directors of the IACPM (International Association of Credit Portfolio Managers).

Picoult has been a frequent lecturer on risk topics at professional conferences, regulatory conferences, and at universities, and has published a number of articles on risk topics.