The Derivatives Research Project (DRP) at the NYU Stern School of Business was founded in 1996. Its primary mission is to support theoretical and applied research on derivative instruments and markets, risk management, financial engineering, and related areas of quantitative finance, and to promote interaction among academics and practitioners in these important and constantly expanding fields. Stephen Figlewski has served as the Director of the NASDAQ DRP from the beginning. The DRP is housed within the NYU Salomon Center.

Major grants from NASDAQ beginning in 2005, acknowledged by a name change to the NASDAQ Derivatives Research Project have allowed the DRP to support a high level of research output, put on numerous high-profile DRP conferences and events, and provide valuable support to Stern faculty, Finance Ph.D. students, and visiting scholars from other universities. Related research areas supported through the DRP include Volatility and Correlation, Systemic Risk, Market Microstructure, Liquidity, and most recently Climate Risk. Annual conference series were launched on Volatility and on Market Microstructure Conferences, along with our traditional large-scale Derivatives State of the Art conference, the annual Research Day, and smaller-scale Symposia on topics of interest to practitioners and academics in derivatives and related fields.

In April 2017, the Derivatives Research Project and the Volatility Institute sponsored an extraordinary two-day conference on "Derivatives and Volatility 2017: The State of the Art." The conference program and videos of the proceedings are available on the DRP website.