Leo Melamed, Chairman Emeritus of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), was honored with the Scopus Award by the American Friends of The Hebrew University on June 18, 2007, at Chicago's Fairmont Hotel. Dinner co-chairs Terrence A. Duffy and Charles "Corky" Goodman, along with committee members Mel Katten, Sam Sallerson, William Brodsky and others, paid tribute to this enormously accomplished and distinguished man, and the inimitable Carl Reiner will be the guest speaker. Proceeds from the event will benefit The Leo Melamed Scholarship Fund in Financial Marketing at the Business School at The Hebrew University.

Recognized as the founder of financial futures markets, Leo Melamed was named by the Chicago Tribune among the ten most important Chicagoans in business of the 20th Century. His story is a testimony to his achievements - an immigrant child from Poland, who with his parents, outwitted and escaped the Gestapo and KGB, fled through three continents, and finally settled in the United States in 1941.

In 1972, as Chairman of the CME, Melamed created the International Monetary Market (IMM), the first futures market for financial instruments. In the years that followed, he led the CME in the introduction of a diverse number of financial instruments, including Treasury Bills, Eurodollars, and in 1982, stock index futures. In 1987, Melamed and his colleagues pioneered the concept of electronic trading of derivatives contracts and in 1992 launched CME Globex, the world's first global electronic trading platform. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange is today the world's premier futures market whose shares are publicly traded on the NYSE.

Leo Melamed received a Presidential appointment to the Council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, from 1991 to 2005. Among his many awards are the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business Leo Melamed Prize and the University of Chicago Leo Melamed Endowed Chair for the study of futures markets. In 1998, the Weizmann Institute of Science established the Betty and Leo Melamed Scholarship in Biomedical Research. In 1999, Mr. Melamed received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Illinois. In 2000, John Marshall Law School established the Leo Melamed Fellowship in International Business and Trade Law. In 2003, Renmin University of Beijing awarded him an Honorary Professorship. He has written extensively on financial markets as well as published his memoir, Escape to the Futures, which was translated and published in Japanese and Chinese.