James W. Lark, III is a professor in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering and the Applied Mathematics program in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. He has also served as a professor in the Department of Statistics and the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia. In addition, he has served as Assistant to the Athletics Director for Special Projects at the University of Virginia.
He has served as a visiting scholar in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley and the Department of Mathematics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In addition, he has served as a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Public Choice at Virginia Tech and at the Center for Research in Government Policy and Business at the University of Rochester.
His current research projects include risk analysis in financial markets, collective decision making processes, applications of Markov decision processes, and operator theory. His solution procedure for finite-horizon partially observed Markov decision processes is known in the research literature as the “Lark algorithm” (or “Lark filtering algorithm”).
Dr. Lark serves as the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Advocates for Self-Government. He is the secretary of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Individual Liberty. He is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Freedom and Entrepreneurship Foundation (Fundacja Wolnosci I Przedsiebiorczosci) in Poland.
He is a member of the (United States) Libertarian Party’s national committee and served as the Libertarian Party’s national chairman during the 2000-2002 term.
