2009 Distinguished Alumni Award: Daniel LeVine

Daniel LeVine entered the Honors Program at UConn in fall of 1974. Dan majored in mathematics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. Subsequently, he graduated summa cum laude from UConn in 1978.

After leaving UConn, Dan continued his studies at the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University where he earned his Ph.D. His doctoral dissertation, “Multidimensional Scaling with Dissimilarity as a Nonmonotone Function of Distance,” explored how an algorithm commonly used in mathematical psychology could be modified in order to broaden its application.

Upon the completion of his graduate work, Dr. LeVine first joined consulting firm Applied Mathematics, Inc. in Gales Ferry, Connecticut. He then subsequently spent nine years with a subcontractor at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA, where he developed algorithms for the analysis of radar data, with particular emphasis on Kalman filtering techniques. In 1993, Dr. LeVine moved to the Chicago area and into the world of finance, joining what was then a small hedge fund company called Wellington Financial Group, which employed about 25 people and which engaged primarily in the arbitrage of convertible bonds and warrants. Soon after his arrival there, he developed a new algorithm for convertible bond valuation and hedging which became Wellington’s main valuation technique. As the firm grew it was renamed Citadel Investment Group, and Dan’s  responsibilities with the firm grew as well. By 1996, Dan had earned the Chartered  Financial Analyst designation and was named Citadel’s Interim Chief Information Officer in order to oversee a reorganization of Citadel’s Information Systems group.

At the conclusion of that reorganization and with Citadel still growing rapidly and diversifying, Dr. LeVine served Citadel in a number of other roles. During the next few years, Dan was named a Senior Managing Director of the firm and managed Citadel’s quantitative research in the areas of Credit Trading and Equity-Linked Derivatives. Thereafter he was named to Citadel’s Management Committee and, starting in 2002, led the start-up of Citadel’s energy trading business. By the time Dan decided to retire from Citadel in 2006 at the age of 48, the firm’s assets under management had grown into the billions of dollars, the firm employed nearly 1000 people, and Citadel was recognized as one of the world’s foremost hedge fund management companies. Today Dan is still retired, spends a good deal of time traveling with his wife, Corinne, and trades in the financial markets for his personal account.