Dr. Richard Sandor (Ph.D.) is Chairman and CEO of Chicago-based Environmental Financial Products (EFP), which specializes in inventing, designing and developing new financial markets. EFP was established in 1998 and was the predecessor company and incubator to the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), the European Climate Exchange (ECX), the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange (CCFE) and the Tianjin Climate Exchange (TCX). Dr. Sandor is currently the Aaron Director Lecturer in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School and a Visiting Fellow with the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University.
Dr. Sandor was honored by the City of Chicago for his universal recognition as the “father of financial futures”. In 2002 he was named by TIME Magazine a “Hero of the Planet”; and in 2007 as one of the magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment” for his work as the “Father of Carbon Trading.” In October 2013, Dr. Sandor was awarded the title of Chevalier dans l´ordre de la Légion d´Honneur (Knight in the French National Order of the Legion of Honor), for his accomplishments in the field of environmental finance and carbon trading.
Dr. Sandor was a faculty member of the School of Business Administration at the University of California, Berkeley, and held a faculty position at Stanford University. He was named the first Martin C. Remer Visiting Distinguished Professor of Finance in the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. He was a Distinguished Adjunct Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Business, where he taught the first Environmental Finance course at a major business school. He served as Distinguished Professor of Environmental Finance at Guanghua School of Management at Peking University and as a member of its International Advisory Board. He holds an honorary degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Dr. Sandor is a Board Member of the Clean Energy Trust, a Member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Financial Stability and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute; and a Senior Fellow of the Milken Institute. He served on the board of directors of leading commodity and futures exchanges in the United States and Europe, including the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Intercontinental Exchange. Dr. Sandor is the author of “Good Derivatives: A Story of Financial and Environmental Innovation,” also published in Chinese by People’s Oriental Press; and the lead author of “Sustainable Investing and Environmental Markets: Opportunities in a New Asset Class” (published by World Scientific).
He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brooklyn College and holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota.