Presenter’s Bios
Sanjiv Das, Santa Clara University
Sanjiv Das is the William and Janice Terry Professor of Finance and Data Science at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. He previously held faculty appointments as Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and UC Berkeley. He holds post-graduate degrees in Finance (M.Phil and Ph.D. from New York University), Computer Science (M.S. from UC Berkeley), an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, B.Com in Accounting and Economics (University of Bombay, Sydenham College), and is also a qualified Cost and Works Accountant (AICWA). He is a senior editor of The Journal of Investment Management, co-editor of The Journal of Derivatives and The Journal of Financial Services Research, and Associate Editor of other academic journals. Prior to being an academic, he worked in the derivatives business in the Asia-Pacific region as a Vice-President at Citibank. His current research interests include machine learning, social networks, derivatives pricing models, portfolio theory, the modeling of default risk, systemic risk, and venture capital. He has published over ninety articles in academic journals. He currently also serves as a Senior Fellow at the FDIC Center for Financial Research.
Full bio: http://srdas.github.io/
Seoyoung Kim, Santa Clara University
Seoyoung Kim currently holds a faculty appointment at Santa Clara University, where she teaches FinTech and Financial Engineering. Her research agenda is focused on innovative financial assets, with her earlier work in this arena centered on structured financial instruments and distressed debt. Along this regard, she has provided consulting expertise and litigation support with regard to the structuring, management and liquidation of various special purpose vehicles issuing collateralized debt obligations. Prior to joining Santa Clara University, Prof. Kim held a faculty appointment at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Alex “Sandy” Pentland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alex “Sandy” Pentland directs MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, co-leads the World Economic Forum Big Data and Personal Data initiatives, and is a founding member of the Advisory Boards for Nissan, Motorola Mobility, Telefonica, and a variety of start-up firms. He has previously helped create and direct MIT’s Media Laboratory, the Media Lab Asia laboratories at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and Strong Hospital’s Center for Future Health.
In 2012 Forbes named Sandy one of the `seven most powerful data scientists in the world’, along with Google founders and the CTO of the United States, and in 2013 he won the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review. He is among the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and a pioneer in computational social science, organizational engineering, wearable computing(Google Glass), image understanding, and modern biometrics. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, and Harvard Business Review, as well as being the focus of TV features on BBC World, Discover and Science channels. His most recent book is `Honest Signals,’ published by MIT Press.
Over the years Sandy has advised more than 50 PhD students. Almost half are now tenured faculty at leading institutions, with another one-quarter leading industry research groups and a final quarter founders of their own companies.
Sandy’s research group and entrepreneurship program have spun off more than 30 companies to date, three of which are publicly listed and several that serve millions of poor in Africa and South Asia. Recent spin-offs have been featured in publications such as the Economist and the New York Times, as well as winning a variety of prizes from international development organizations.
Roberto Rigobon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Roberto Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and a visiting professor at IESA.
Roberto is a Venezuelan economist whose areas of research are international economics, monetary economics, and development economics. Roberto focuses on the causes of balance-of-payments crises, financial crises, and the propagation of them across countries—the phenomenon that has been identified in the literature as contagion. Currently he studies properties of international pricing practices, trying to produce alternative measures of inflation. He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project, and a co-founder of PriceStats.
Roberto joined the business school in 1997 and has won both the “Teacher of the Year” award and the “Excellence in Teaching” award at MIT three times.
He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1997, an MBA from IESA (Venezuela) in 1991, and his BS in Electrical Engineer from Universidad Simon Bolivar (Venezuela) in 1984.
Roger M. Stein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Roger M. Stein is a Research Affiliate at the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering.
He has been actively engaged in developing, implementing and writing about new approaches to applied risk modeling and financial prediction for almost 25 years. He and his teams have developed, implemented, and delivered products and services that have become industry benchmarks in banking and finance.
In addition to his academic work, Stein has held a number of senior positions in industry. He was the Chief Analytics Officer at State Street GX as well as Senior Managing Director of Product Strategy. Before this, he was managing director of research and academic relations globally for Moody’s Corporation and prior to this, president of Moody’s research labs. Earlier in his career, he was co-head of research at Moody’s KMV.
Stein has written over fifty professional and academic articles and has coauthored two full-length texts on applied analytics. His current research interests are in the areas of systemic risk, credit risk, model risk and validation, biomedical funding, and the interface between data mining and financial theory. He is also Affiliated Researcher at the Berkeley Center for Risk Management Research.
Stein is on the editorial board of several finance journals. He is also the founder and president of the Consortium for Systemic Risk Analytics and a member of the Advisory Council of the Museum of Mathematics; the Board of PlaNet Finance, USA, and the Academic Advisory Board of the EC’s Systemic Risk Tomography Project (SYRTO).
Stein holds a master’s degree and PhD from the Stern School of Business, New York University.
David L. Yermack, New York University
David L. Yermack is the Albert Fingerhut Professor of Finance and Business Transformation at New York University Stern School of Business. He serves as Chairman of the Finance Department and Director of the NYU Pollack Center for Law and Business. Professor Yermack teaches joint MBA – Law School courses in Restructuring Firms & Industries and Bitcoin & Cryptocurrencies, as well as PhD research courses in corporate governance, executive compensation, and distress and restructuring.
Professor Yermack has been with NYU Stern since 1994. His primary research areas include boards of directors, executive compensation, and corporate finance. Professor Yermack has published more than 25 articles in leading academic journals in Finance, Accounting, Economics, and Law. He is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been a Visiting Scholar at the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank.
Professor Yermack received his Bachelor of Arts in Economics (1985), Master of Business Administration (1991), Juris Doctor (1991), Master of Arts in Business Economics (1993), and Doctor of Philosophy in Business Economics (1994) from Harvard University.