Sylvia Nasar

Background

Nasar was born in Rosenheim, Germany, to a Bavarian mother and an Uzbek father, Rusi Nasar, who later joined the Central Intelligence Agency as an intelligence officer

Education

She graduated with a Bachelor in Literature from Antioch College in 1970 and earned a Master"s degree in Economics at New York University in 1976.

Career

Her family immigrated to the United States in 1951, then moved to Ankara, Turkey, in 1960. She joined Fortune magazine as a staff writer in 1983, became an columnist for United States. News & World Report in 1990, and was an economic correspondent for the New York Times from 1991 to 1999. She has been the first John South. and James L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University since 2001.

In March 2013, Nasar filed a lawsuit accusing the university of misdirecting $4.5 million in funds over the last decade from the same Knight endowment which pays her salary.

The New York Times reported, "In her suit, Mississippi Nasar said that after she complained about the misspent funds, “intimidated and harassed” her by telling her that the Knight Foundation “was dissatisfied with her performance as Knight chair because Knight objected to her work on books” She has three adult children, Clara, Lily and Jack, and lives in Tarrytown, New New York

Her husband is Fordham University economist Darryl McLeod. In 1998, Nasar published, a biography of Nobel Prize-winning economist and mathematician John Forbes Nash, Junior.

The book describes many aspects of Nash"s life, examines his personality and motivations, and deals with the stresses placed on his personal and professional relationships by severe mental illness.

Nasar"s second book, Grand Pursuit, was published in 2011. lieutenant is a historical narrative which sets forth Nasar"s view that economics rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material circumstances in its own hands rather than in Fate. Some mathematicians wrote letters in defense of Yau over Nasar"s portrayal and Yau threatened to file a lawsuit, but no suit was filed.

2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Science and technology).

Achievements

• 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Science and technology), 1999 Rhône-Poulenc Prize, nominated, 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, 1998 Pulitzer Prize for biography, nominated.