Jean-Philippe Bouchaud was born in France in 1962. After studying at the French Lycée of London, he graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he also obtained his PhD in physics. He was then appointed by the CNRS until 1992. After a year spent in the Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge), he joined the Service de Physique de l’Etat Condensé (CEA-Saclay), where he worked on the dynamics of glassy systems and on granular media.
He became interested in economics and theoretical finance in 1991. His work in finance includes extreme risk models, agent based simulations, market microstructure and price formation. He has been very critical about the standard concepts and models used in economics and in the financial industry (market efficiency, Black-Scholes models, etc.)
He founded the company Science & Finance in 1994 that merged with Capital Fund Management (CFM) in 2000. He is now the President and Head of Research at CFM, and professor at Ecole Polytechnique since 2008. He was awarded the IBM young scientist prize in 1990 and the C.N.R.S. Silver Medal in 1996. He has published over 250 scientific papers and several books in physics and in finance.