John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Sylvia Nasar, journalist, economist and author of the award-winning "A Beautiful Mind" is the first to hold the Knight Chair in Journalism, with an emphasis on business and economics reporting, at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

Prior to her appointment at Columbia, Dr. Nasar was an economics reporter at The New York Times, and has been a writer at Fortune and a columnist at U.S. News & World Report. She is currently a By-Fellow in Churchill College at Cambridge University in England, where she is working on a book about 20th century economic thinkers.

Nasar's first book, "A Beautiful Mind" won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Helen Bernstein Journalism Award, and the Rhone Poulenc Prize for Science Writing and, most recently, was honored by the three leading American mathematics societies. Translated into more than a half dozen foreign languages, "A Beautiful Mind" was adapted for the screen and released as feature film in 2001, directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe.

A native of Germany, Nasar grew up in New York, Washington, DC and Ankara, Turkey. She studied literature at Antioch College and completed a master's degree in economics at New York University, where she subsequently conducted research with Nobel Laureate Wassily Leontief at the Institute for Economic Analysis.