2022 Alumni Achievement Award
Sebastian Ceria’s early experiences as a scholar at Carnegie Mellon helped shape the beliefs that drive him today: That the future is tightly linked to our capacity to produce knowledge. While investment in science and technology is vital, providing equal-opportunity access to education is critical to the optimal execution of that process. His work as an academic, entrepreneur, and business and philanthropic leader has driven key innovations and advancements in the global financial technology field, while staying true to this vision.
He currently serves as chief executive officer of Qontigo, a global provider of innovative index, analytics and risk solutions and an operating unit of the Deutsche Börse Group, an international exchange organization and market infrastructure provider.
Sebastian earned a degree in applied mathematics from the University of Buenos Aires in his native Argentina, but a scholarship to pursue doctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon University proved to be transformative to his career path. In Pittsburgh, he earned his master's degree and Ph.D. from the Tepper School of Business in industrial administration and operations research, before completing an additional year of study as a post-doctoral fellow.
Pursuing a career in academia, Sebastian then joined the Columbia Business School as an associate professor of decision, risk and operations, conducting extensive research on integer programming and its applications that served as the foundation for his future as an entrepreneur and business leader. In 1998, Sebastian launched Axioma, a startup then focused on broad applications of optimization. Over two decades, he grew the company into a leading provider of innovative risk-management, portfolio-optimization and performance-attribution software and solutions for the financial services industry.
Deutsche Börse acquired Axioma in 2019 and merged it with its DAX and STOXX indexing businesses to create Qontigo, which delivers sophisticated and targeted solutions at scale to meet the investment objectives of investors, traders and asset owners.
In 2021, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He has also earned the National Science Foundation’s Career Award for Operations Research and the RAICES prize from Argentina’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
Sebastian is the founder and president of Fundar, a nonprofit think tank promoting inclusive, sustainable development for Argentina. He serves on the board of New York’s Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners, a nonprofit that builds alternative financial products for workers who traditionally are at risk of falling into unsustainable debt. Sebastian continues to give back to the CMU community by sitting on the Master of Science in Computational Finance Advisory Board and is a significant contributor to the Egon Balas Ph.D. Fellowship Fund.