Professor Menachem Brenner is one of the Academic Directors of the HKUST-NYU Stern MS in Global Finance Program.  Professor Brenner's primary areas of research include derivative markets structure, option pricing, inflation expectations, auctions, market efficiency and liquidity. His articles have appeared in leading journals in finance and economics including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Business, the Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Monetary Economics. In 1986, he co-invented (with Prof. Galai) the volatility index based on the prices of traded index options and introduced the idea of volatility derivatives, an idea which was implemented 20 years later. He has written more than 60 scholarly articles in diverse areas in finance and economics.

Professor Brenner was a founding editor of the Review of Derivatives Research and has served on several editorial boards and program committees. He is a regular member of the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics nominating committee. He received several grants and the Graham Dodd Award for excellence in financial writing. He was also awarded Stern's Glucksman Prize for the best new research paper in Finance. In addition to working with doctoral students and teaching the popular finance course on "Futures and Options," he served as deputy chairman of the finance department and is currently the director of the Masters in Global Finance program, a joint venture between the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's Business School and NYU Stern.  He was a floor trader in options and futures at the NYFE and NYSE.