Leadership

	David Mechner, President David Mechner cofounded Pragma Financial Systems in 2002, led the development of Pragma's flagship product, TradeEngine, and directs Pragma's development team. Pragma has since established itself as an extraordinarily innovative firm, providing unique high-frequency-trading tools, unmatched in their robustness and quantitative sophistication, to institutional clients. Before founding Pragma, David developed and implemented high-frequency-trading strategies as director of research at Pragma Hedge Fund. David entered the field of finance from academia; he was a doctoral fellow at New York University's Center for Neural Science. His interest in intelligent systems began during his computer-science undergraduate years, when he started and led a research effort to develop a strong Go-playing program. David participated in the Japanese professional promotion system for Go and is now among the strongest non-Asian Go players in the world.
	Lee Maclin, Director of Research Lee Maclin directs Pragma's substantial modeling and research effort, including the development and testing of high-frequency models for the TradeEngine platform. Lee started his career on Wall Street some 20 years ago and has worked for firms like Bear Stearns, ED&F Man & Co., Reuters and Equitable. For five years, Lee ran a statistical trading department for Mint Investment Management, one of the commodity trading advisers featured in the best-selling book Market Wizards. Lee is currently in his eighth year of teaching financial mathematics in the Masters in Mathematical Finance program at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU. His classes have covered a broad range of trading-related topics, including econometrics and statistical inference, statistical arbitrage and computational methods in finance. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events, where his presentations focus on the topics of optimal execution and dynamic portfolio management.
	Peter Fraenkel, Director of Quantitative Services Peter Fraenkel manages quantitative services and development for Pragma. Before joining Pragma, He spent 12 years at Morgan Stanley, where he was a managing director in charge of the global equity derivatives risk and pricing group. Peter designed and led development of the firm's analytical modeling libraries, real-time risk management, regulatory risk aggregation, automatic trading and pricing tools for a portfolio encompassing international equity, listed and exotic derivatives, swaps and convertible bonds. Prior to his work at Morgan Stanley, Peter held quantitative and risk management positions at Paine Webber and Bear Stearns. Peter holds a doctorate in physics from Cornell University. He has taught extensively for the Courant Masters in Mathematical Finance program, where he remains a teaching fellow. He is also on the board of directors for the University of Chicago's mathematical finance master's program.
	Francis Mechner, Chairman Francis Mechner received his bachelor and master's degrees from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in experimental psychology (1957) from the Columbia University Graduate Faculties of Pure Science, where he also served on the teaching and research faculty for four years. His professional activities and publications have been in basic experimental research in the fields of behavior, behavior technology, learning, training, education, early childhood development and theory. Since 1960, Mechner has started and built a number of corporations based on new and innovative technology. The first of these was Basic Systems, Inc., which later became Xerox Learning Systems and then Learning International. Subsequent endeavors included Chyron Corporation, TeleSession Corporation, General Clutch Corporation and TorqMaster, Inc. .