Biography
Email Print
Sylvia Nasar is the first James S. and John L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University and co-directs the M.A. program in business journalism with James B. Stewart, Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism, and Bruce Greenwald, the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Finance and Asset Management at Columbia’s Graduate School of Business.
Professor Nasar is the author of the bestselling biography, A Beautiful Mind, which has been published in 30 languages, including Farsi, Turkish, Russian and Hindi, and inspired the Academy Award-winning movie directed by Ron Howard (2001).
Trained as an economist, Professor Nasar was a New York Times economics correspondent (1991-1999), staff writer at Fortune (1983-1989) and columnist at U.S. News & World Report (1990). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Newsweek, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, FastCompany, London Telegraph and numerous other publications. She has lectured frequently on topics ranging from globalization and economics to mental illness and mathematics. Professor Nasar co-edited The Essential John Nash (2001) and is currently writing a narrative history about 20th century economic thinkers titled Grand Pursuit.
She is the recipient of many honors including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (1998) and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography (1998). She has held visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation (2006-2007), the MacDowell Colony (2006), Yaddo (2005), the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2002-2003, 1995-96); and Kings and Churchill Colleges, Cambridge University (2000). She has served as a judge for the National Book Award, Anthony Lucas Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, Dow Jones Newswires, and SABEW and serves on the advisory board of TeenScreen.
Nasar was born in Bavaria in 1947 to a German mother and Uzbek father. Her family immigrated to the United States in 1951 and lived in New York and Washington, D.C. before moving to Ankara, Turkey in 1960. In 1965, she returned to the U.S. on her own and attended Antioch College where she majored in literature. She also spent a year at the University of Munich. After working for several years, she entered the Ph.D. program in economics at New York University, completing a master’s degree in 1976. For four years, she did research with Nobel Laureate Wassily Leontief at the Institute for Economic Analysis.
She and her husband, Darryl Mcleod, also an economist, have three children, Clara, Lily and Jack, and live in Tarrytown, New York. 
Professor 