NYU Law mourns the untimely death of Sarah Woo

On July 15, Dean Richard Revesz informed the Law School community that Assistant Professor of Law Sarah Woo had passed away after a seven-week battle against encephalitis. Woo fell ill in late May while traveling in Toronto.

“I know that our entire community shares my shock and sorrow at this incomprehensible loss,” Revesz said. “Sarah was a gifted colleague whose intelligence and cutting-edge scholarship made her an important member of our intellectual community. Her time with us was much too brief.”

Woo joined the NYU Law faculty in June 2010. She was a specialist in financial regulation, corporate bankruptcy, and credit risk management. Her work used sophisticated empirical research methods to inform financial regulatory reform; she most recently taught a new course on international financial regulation.
 
A star undergraduate student at the National University of Singapore, Woo graduated first in her class with her LL.B. She went on to work for several years in private practice, first in corporate finance law at Baker & McKenzie (Singapore) and White & Case (San Francisco), and later in finance at Morgan Stanley (San Francisco and Shanghai) in the equity research team and as an associate director at Moody’s KVM (New York and London). There, she advised banks seeking to predict debtors’ bankruptcy and liquidation risks, quantified risks assumed by financial institutions, and implemented Basel II initiatives. Woo then earned her J.S.D. at Stanford Law School.

Posted on July 21, 2011