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Founded by UVA alumni

A quantitative trading firm run from Charlottesville.

Jaffray Woodriff built one of the most respected systematic trading operations in the world without leaving the town he grew up in — then used the proceeds to give UVA the first school of data science in the country.

2003founded, in Charlottesville
$120Mgift that founded the School of Data Science
1991McIntire

How it started: Jaffray Woodriff ’91

  • Jaffray WoodriffMcIntire 1991 · co-founder, chief executive

Jaffray Woodriff came out of McIntire in 1991 convinced that markets could be predicted statistically, and spent the next decade proving it on his own account. In May 2003 he founded Quantitative Investment Management with Michael Geismar and Greyson Williams, trading their own money first; by the end of that year they were managing other people’s.

QIM builds statistical models that find patterns across futures markets, and it has run the whole operation from Charlottesville rather than New York, London or Chicago — a deliberate choice, and one of the reasons the region has a quantitative talent base at all.

How it changed the world

Woodriff turned a career in systematic trading into the founding gift for the first school of data science in the nation. His Quantitative Foundation’s $120M in 2019 was the largest individual private grant in UVA’s history, and it created the school that now anchors the University’s work in AI and data — a direct line from one alumnus’s method to an institution that will outlast him.

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