Paul D. McNelis holds the Robert Bendheim Chair in Economic and Financial Policy in the Department of Finance, Graduate School of Business Administration, Fordham University.  His office is located at 1790 Broadway, Room 1322.  He arrived at Fordham in Fall, 2005.

McNelis was previously a Professor of Economics at Georgetown, joining the faculty in 1977 as an Assistant Professor. His Ph. D. is from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and his undergraduate degree is from Boston College. He was born in Hazleton, Pa., where his father was Executive Director of the United Mine Workers Health and Welfare Fund, and his mother worked for the Pennsylvania State Department of Employment Security.  After completing his theological studies McNelis was ordained as a Catholic priest for the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus on June 4, 1977 .

At Georgetown McNelis regularly taught courses in the fields of International Finance, Macro, and Monetary Economics. McNelis also worked as the  faculty liaison of the Georgetown M.A.-Economics collaborative program (Instituto Latinoamericano de Doctrina y Estudios Sociales, ILADES ) since its 1987 inception in Santiago,Chile.  ILADES is now part of the newly formed Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago.

McNelis has worked with various international development organizations in Washington as well as  central banks throughout the world, such as the Central Bank of Ireland, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Bank of Indonesia, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Japan, the Central Bank of the Philippines, and Bank Bangladesh.

McNelis was also a visiting professor at Trinity College, Dublin in 1986-87,  the first Philips visiting professor at the Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo, Brazil during the 1994-95 academic year, and the Gasson Professor of Economics at Boston College during the 2001-02 academic year. He has taught in multiple languages, offering short courses on Neural Networks and Finance in Portuguese in São Paulo and Brasília, Brazil, and in Spanish in Barcelona, Léon, and Santiago, Chile.

His writings are in the field of Computational Macroeconomics, concentrating on problems of adjustment and financial liberalization in Latin America and Asia. His current research is on applications of neural networks and genetic algorithms for predicting exchange rate and asset-price instabilities, for assessing the effects of alternative monetary aggregates on inflation and interest rates in the short run, for evaluating credit risks in emerging markets, and solving real business cycle models.

 Neural Networks in Finance: Gaining Predictive Edge in the Market, (Elsevier Academic Press)  was published in Jan. 2005,  and another book, Computational  Macroeconomics for the Open Economy (MIT Press),  appeared in Oct. 2008  The latter is a collaborative venture with Professor Guay C. Lim of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Society Research, University of Melbourne, Australia.