NEIL D. PEARSON, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research includes work on the development, estimation, and evaluation of models for pricing and hedging various derivatives and other financial instruments. Dr. Pearson has published papers in a number of academic journals, and is an Associate Editor of both the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He has consulted for a number of U.S. and international banks, working on term structure models, the evaluation of derivatives pricing models, and issues that arise in the computation of Value-at-Risk measures. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.