Stephen Della Pietra received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Princeton University in 1981, and his PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard University in 1986. From 1987 to 1988, he was a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin. From 1988 to 1989, he was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

From 1989 to 1995, he was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights and Hawthorne, New York. As a project leader of the natural language understanding group, his primary research focused on machine translation and natural language understanding. In 1995 he joined Renaissance Technologies, where he currently co-manages the General Research Group and works on statistical methods to model the stock market.

Stephen is co-founder of the Della Pietra Lecture Series at Stony Brook University. This series brings world-renowned scientists to the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, and is intended to bring awareness of recent and impactful discoveries in physics and mathematics to high school, undergraduate and graduate students. Stephen is a board member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, is on the advisory council of the astrophysics department at Princeton University, is a board member of the National Museum of Mathematics in New York, and is a board member of the nonprofit organization PIVOT.