Kelly Roos
Professor
Education
Ph.D., Physics, Iowa State University
B.S., Physics, Bradley University
Biography
Kelly Roos is Professor of Finance in the Department of Economics and Finance, a position he has held since 2023. His route to the Foster College was an unusual one: he earned a BS in Physics from Bradley in 1987 and a PhD in Condensed Matter Physics from Iowa State University in 1993, joined the Bradley faculty that same year, and held professorships in Physics and later in Mechanical Engineering before moving to finance. He teaches Derivatives Markets, Investments Analysis, Business Finance, and Quantitative Methods, and is the founding faculty advisor of Bradley’s Student Managed Investment Fund.
Prof. Roos’s current scholarship sits in econophysics — the application of the mathematics and computational machinery of statistical physics to financial markets. His published work in this area includes an Ising spin-state model of financial asset allocation, agent-based kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of market dynamics, and a simulations of the conditions under which a market can be driven into catastrophic disequilibrium. Recent work appears in Physica A, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, and as a chapter in the De Gruyter volume Select Topics of Econophysics (2025).
That work grows out of a long career in experimental and computational surface physics, where he studied how individual atoms move, interact, and self-assemble into nanostructures on material surfaces — work that produced more than 40 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings, invited talks throughout the United States and Europe, and a decade-long collaboration as Visiting Scientist with the Center for NanoIntegration at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.
Prof. Roos is a founding member and Chair of the Leadership Council of the Partnership for Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics (PICUP), a national community of faculty working to weave contemporary computation into the undergraduate physics curriculum. He has led roughly 70 faculty development workshops across the country under its auspices, supported by a series of collaborative Improving Undergraduate STEM Education grants from the National Science Foundation. In 2023 he received the American Physical Society’s Excellence in Physics Education Award for this effort; his earlier curricular work was recognized in 2006 as “Pioneering Work in Computational Physics Education” by Computing in Science and Engineering. He has secured more than $4.7 million in external funding over his career, chairs the Physics Panel of the National Research Council’s Research Associates Program at the National Academies, and is a past president of the Illinois Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers.