Nobel laureates Robert C Merton, Mo Yan to speak at UM’s Doctor honoris causa Forums

Nobel laureates Prof Robert C Merton and Prof Mo Yan will speak at the University of Macau’s (UM) two Doctor honoris causa Forums to be held on 6 December and 7 December respectively. Prof Robert C Merton, the 1997 Nobel laureate in economics, will give a talk entitled “On the Role of the Science of Finance in the Global Practice of Finance: Past, Present and Future”. Prof Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel laureate in literature, will speak on the “Achievements of Chinese Literature and Its Future”.

The first Doctor honoris causa Forum, whose theme is “Finance and Social Responsibility”, will be held in the University Hall on Saturday 6 December. It will begin at 2:30pm and Prof Merton will be the keynote speaker. Prof Merton is noted for putting finance theories into practice and has re-shaped the world of finance and economics with his Option Pricing Theory and Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model. His replicating portfolio strategy remains a standard approach to pricing derivative securities. Prof Merton received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1997 in recognition of his significant contributions to the development of a new method for pricing derivatives. At the forum, Prof Merton will share his insights on the Role of the Science of Finance in the Global Practice of Finance: Past, Present and Future. Tian Guoli, chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank of China, will speak on “Have the courage to shoulder the responsibility of building social sustainability”, as a guest speaker.

The second Doctor honoris causa Forum, whose theme is “Achievements of Chinese Literature and Its Future”, will be held in the University Hall on 7 December. It will begin at 3:00pm and Prof Mo Yan will be the keynote speaker. Prof Mo is the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel Prize in literature. At the forum, he will discuss the global impact of Chinese literature, its geographic and cultural diversity, as well as the difficulties facing Chinese literature and its future. Dr Wu Zhiliang, president of the Administrative Committee of the Macao Foundation; and Prof Yang Yi, chair professor at UM, will be the guest speakers. Prof Mo Yan is a renowned contemporary Chinese writer. In 2012, he received the Nobel Prize in literature for his ability to merge “hallucinatory realism” with “folk tales, history and the contemporary” in his work. Prof Mo became noted for having written a corpus of in-search-of-roots works with infusions of the raw rural culture in the mid-1980s. His 1986 novel Red Sorghum Clan was the first neo-historical novel in modern Chinese Literature and would be later published around the world in nearly 20 languages.

Simultaneous interpreting between Chinese and English will be provided for the two forums. For enquiries, please call 88228400 or email to prs.event@um.edu.mo. For registration, please visit https://isw.um.edu.mo/evm/register/merton (Robert C Merton)/ https://isw.um.edu.mo/evm/register/moyanforum (Mo Yan).