Bryan T. Kelly AQR Capital Management Head of Machine Learning & Yale Professor
Columbia Mathematics of Finance (MAFN) & Department of Statistics 2026 Future of Portfolio Management & Artificial Intelligence Conference
Bryan T. Kelly is a Principal at AQR Capital Management, where he serves as Head of Machine Learning, a portfolio manager, and a senior member of the Integrated Research group AQR Capital Management. In this role, he leads the development and implementation of machine learning methods and models into AQR’s investment portfolios, integrating cutting-edge techniques to enhance signal generation and model performance.
Academic and Research Profile
Kelly is the Frederick Frank ’54 and Mary C. Tanner Professor of Finance at the Yale School of Management, a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and Associate Director of Yale’s International Center for Finance Yale School of Management. His research focuses on asset pricing, financial econometrics, and financial machine learning, with interests in volatility, tail risk, correlation modeling, banking systemic risk, financial intermediation, and financial networks Yale School of Management+1.
He has published extensively in top finance journals, including the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies, Yale School of Management. He is co-editor of the Journal of Financial Econometrics and an associate editor of Journal of Finance and Journal of Financial Economics.
Education and Early Career
- A.B. in Economics – University of Chicago
- M.A. in Economics – University of California, San Diego
- Ph.D. in Finance – New York University Stern School of Business
Before joining Yale, Kelly was a tenured Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He also worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley prior to earning his Ph.D.
Awards and Recognition
Kelly has received multiple prestigious awards for his research, including:
- Harry M. Markowitz Award (2021) – Journal of Investment Management
- Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award (2020) – Journal of Portfolio Management
- Fama-DFA Prize (2020, 2017) – Journal of Financial Economics
- DFA Distinguished Paper Prize (2023) – Journal of Finance
Current Work at AQR
In his 2025 Outlook webinar, Kelly emphasized AQR’s ongoing efforts to push the boundaries of machine learning in investment models, developing new signals and adapting them across different trading environments. His work bridges academic research and practical application, ensuring that theoretical advances in finance and machine learning are translated into robust, deployable investment strategies.
