Iris Mack

Mack lectures and consults on energy derivatives, quantitative finance and high-frequency trading for the Fitch 7City Certificate of Quantitative Finance Program in New York City, Fitch 7City Corporate Finance Consulting Group in Singapore and The Terrapinn Group in Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and London. In 2010 and 2011 she wrote a number of articles for the Huffington Post including "Bob Rubin Just Wants to Be Cuddled" where she describes her relationship with Bob Rubin in 2007 and 2008 during the financial crisis while he was Chairman and "Senior Counselor" at Citigroup. She currently lectures at the graduate level on energy trading and risk management at the Freeman School of Business.

Mack founded Phat Math Inc. in Miami, Florida in 2003. A few years later in 2007 she and her colleagues at Phat Math launched their prototype mathematics edutainment social network PhatMath.com. Students in grades K-12 and College have access to free 24/7 online math homework help on PhatMath.com, which was named one of the Top 50 Social Sites for Educators and Academics and 25 Useful Networking Sites for Grad Students. As of November 2016, PhatMath.com's website is not functioning.

Mack grew up in the Calliope Projects in New Orleans in a family of ten. She became interested in space and astrophysics as a teenager and worked as a summer intern at the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility. Mack attended Vassar College, where she graduated with a double major in mathematics and mathematical physics in 1978. While an undergraduate she interned at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Physical Properties Team for the Mars probe Viking program. She attended UCLA for her master's degree in mathematics and worked as a research fellow at AT&T Bell Labs, where she received a patent for her work with Harrison E. Rowe and Ronald V. Schmidt in fiber optics. As a Sloan Fellow she attended the London Business School and earned an executive MBA. In 1986, she became the second black woman to receive a doctorate in applied mathematics from Harvard University. In 1986 she became the first black women to teach applied mathematics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and taught until 1991, teaching courses in financial engineering, statistics, and operations research in addition to applied mathematics. In 1989 she was a semifinalist for the NASA Astronaut Program.