Scott Mason, an expert in capital markets, valuation, and financial systems and an HBS faculty member for seventeen years, died of cancer in September. He was 50 years old. "Scott was a good friend, valued colleague, and mentor to many of us here at the School," Dean Kim B. Clark said in a letter to the HBS community on the occasion of Mason's death.

Mason, who left the School last year to become president and CEO of Investment Technology Group, a New York based financial firm, joined the HBS faculty in 1980. In 1993, he was named the Edmund Cogswell Converse Professor of Finance and Banking and was appointed chair of the Finance area at HBS.

For many years, Mason taught the School's Capital Markets elective. To keep that course relevant during the 1980s, a period of sweeping changes in the field of finance, he led a massive effort in case research and course development. He wrote and published widely on the subject of finance, including, with several HBS coauthors, Cases in Financial Engineering. In 1986, he took a year's leave of absence from the School to work with the Bass Companies in Texas in the area of proprietary trading.

Mason was a key player in the creation and ongoing work of the School's Global Financial System (GFS) study. A multiyear research project involving a number of HBS faculty and some fifteen financial institutions from around the world, the GFS project ranges in scope from policy-oriented concerns, such as attempts to coordinate cross-border financial regulatory environments, to issues such as the allocation of capital within the financial firm.

Born in Presque Isle, Maine, Mason graduated from the University of Maine in 1969. He received an MS in finance at MIT in 1972 and joined Goldman, Sachs & Co. before returning to MIT and earning a Ph.D. in finance in 1980.

Memorial donations may be made to A Better Chance, Noble & Greenough School, or Chapel Hill­Chauncy Hall School, located in the Massachusetts towns of Wellesley, Dedham, and Waltham, respectively.

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