Presenter’s Bios
Bradford Cornell, Anderson School of Management – UCLA
Bradford Cornell is an emeritus Professor of Financial Economics at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. Prof. Cornell has taught courses on Applied Corporate Finance, Investment Banking, and Corporate Valuation. He has recently developed a new course on Energy, Climate Change and Finance. Professor Cornell received his Masters degree in Statistics and his PhD in Financial Economics from Stanford University.
In his academic capacity, Professor Cornell has published more than 125 articles on a wide variety of topics in applied finance, particularly empirical analysis of asset pricing models. He is also the author of Corporate Valuation: Tools for Effective Appraisal and Decision Making, published by Business One Irwin, The Equity Risk Premium and the Long-Run Future of the Stock Market, published by John Wiley and Conceptual Foundations of Investing published by John Wiley. He also has a forthcoming book with Ivo Welch, Moving the Needle: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Fighting Climate Change. He is a past Director and Vice-President of the Western Finance Association and a past Director of the American Finance Association.
As a consultant, Professor Cornell has provided testimony and expert analysis in some of the largest and most widely publicized finance related cases in the United States. Among his clients are AT&T, Berkshire Hathaway, Bristol-Myers, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Merck, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, PG&E, Price Waterhouse, Verizon, Walt Disney and various agencies of the United States Government. Professor Cornell is also a senior advisor to Rayliant Global Investors and to the Cornell Capital Group. In both capacities, he provides advice on fundamental investment valuation.
Lisa Goldberg, University of California, Berkeley / Aperio Group
Lisa Goldberg is Professor of the Practice of Economics and co-Director of the Consortium for Data Analytics in Risk at University of California, Berkeley and Director of Research at Aperio Group. Dr. Goldberg is a mathematician whose research integrates best practices from industry and academia. Her work has touched areas as diverse as topology, dynamical systems, quantitative finance, sports statistics and causal inference. She has published more than 50 articles and is co-author of a book, Portfolio Risk Management, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2010. Dr. Goldberg is inventor on five patents and has been awarded numerous research grants including an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women. She has served on the editorial boards of four quantitative finance journals and two Springer book series. She is a member of the Advisory Council for the Museum of Mathematics. She serves as an arXiv moderator and is an expert judge for the Moskowitz Prize for Socially Responsible Investing.
Ananth Madhavan, BlackRock
Ananth Madhavan, PhD, is Global Head of Research for ETF and Index Investing at BlackRock, Inc. He is responsible for advancing thought leadership and innovation for iShares and indexing through research and analytics. Dr. Madhavan’s service with the firm dates back to 2003, including his years with Barclays Global Investors (BGI), which merged with BlackRock in 2009. At BGI, he was the Global Head of Trading Research and Transitions and CEO of BGI’s affiliate broker. He also worked closely with the alpha and trading teams to design and implement trading strategies to capture short horizon market opportunities. Prior to joining BGI, Dr. Madhavan was a Managing Director of Research at ITG and a member of the firm’s management and executive committees. Previously, he was the Charles B. Thorton Professor of Finance at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Madhavan earned a BA degree from the University of Delhi, MA degree from Boston University, and a PhD in economics from Cornell University.
Yu (Ben) Meng, Eight Sequoias LLC
Dr. Yu (Ben) Meng has two decades of experience working in the global finance industry across three continents. His career has been a systematic accumulation of product knowledge regarding all major asset classes through the various roles he has held on both the sell side and the buy side that culminated in his most recent roles as the DCIO at State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) and CIO at California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), which are, respectively, the largest asset owners in the world and in the US.
His holistic investment experience spans the gamut of investment dimensions. In geographic markets, he has worked in Asia, Europe and the US. In approach, he is a “Quantimental,” with both bottom-up and top-down experience that represents the perfect blend of quantitative and fundamental approaches. In investment horizon, he has a deep knowledge of fast money investment as well as experience with asset owners with decades-long time horizons. Finally, in managing pools of assets, he has been at the helm of two of the largest asset owners in the world and has applied his investment acumen and leadership skills to contribute to the success of these organizations. He is a leader with the highest level of integrity, with an approach of cohesive team building and the ability to positively influence an organization’s culture and financial performance.
In additional to his professional pursuits, Dr. Meng finds the time to actively engage with the academic community. He believes that great investment ideas often originate from the academic community. He serves on the editorial board of Journal of Investment Management (JOIM) and frequently teaches at top business schools globally such as the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was the recipient of the 2014 Cheit Award of Excellence in Teaching.
Dr. Meng holds a Master of Financial Engineering degree from the Haas School of Business at University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Davis.
Paul Pfleiderer, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Paul Pfleiderer is the C. O. G. Miller Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he has been teaching since 1981. Much of his early research addressed issues that arise when agents acting in financial markets or other settings are differentially informed. More recently his work has been focused on issues related to bank regulation and corporate governance. He also has been a recent critic of the inappropriate use of unrealistic theoretical models in finance and economics, especially when they are used in making policy decisions.
Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan School of Management
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.
Amit Seru,Stanford Graduate School of Business
Amit Seru is the Steven and Roberta Denning Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He was formerly a faculty member at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
Professor Seru’s primary research interest is in corporate finance. He is interested in issues related to financial intermediation and regulation, interaction of internal organization of firms with financing and investment, and incentive provision in firms. His papers in these areas have been published in several journals, including, the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Finance and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He was previously Editor of Review of Corporate Finance Studies and a Department Editor (Finance) of Management Science. His research has been featured in major media, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times and the Economist.
Seru earned a B.E. in electronics and communication and an MBA from the University of Delhi. Subsequently, he received a PhD in finance from the University of Michigan before. He was a senior consultant at Accenture before pursuing his Ph.D. Seru was the recipient of a Rackham Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at University of Michigan and received a Lt. Governor’s gold medal for overall academic excellence at the University of Delhi.
Anne Simpson, CalPERS
Anne is CalPERS’ Managing Investment Director for Board Governance & Sustainability, responsible for strategic initiatives across the $450 billion fund. She leads CalPERS’ Sustainable Investment Strategy, which includes Climate Action 100+, a global investor alliance of over $52 trillion driving business action on climate change. Anne also leads CalPERS’ work on human capital management, including diversity & inclusion and financial markets advocacy.
Anne was recognized by TIME Magazine in 2019 as one of 15 women globally leading the fight on climate change and as one of the 100 Most Influential Women in US Finance by Barron’s in 2020. She is cited by the National Association of Corporate Directors as one of the 100 most influential leaders in the boardroom. Anne’s most recent book is “The Financial Ecosystem: The Role of Finance in Achieving Sustainability” (Palgrave MacMillan) with Satyajit Bose and Dong Guo. She is also co-author of “Fair Shares: The Future of Shareholder Power and Responsibility” (Oxford University Press, with Jonathan Charkham”) and wrote one of the first studies in the field “The Greening of Global Investment: How the Environment, Ethics, and Politics are Reshaping Strategies” (The Economist Publications).
Anne has served on the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s Investor Advisory Group and represented the Council of Institutional Investors on the International Financial Reporting Standards’ Advisory Council. She is a member of the Robert F. Kennedy Leadership Council, Senior Advisory Board of the Center for Responsible Business at Haas Business School, and the Institute for Business and Society at UC Berkeley. She is also an editorial board member of the journal Directors & Boards.
In roles prior to joining CalPERS, Anne served as Joint Managing Director of Pensions & Investment Research Consultants Ltd, and as a senior manager at the World Bank where she led the Global Corporate Governance Forum and was the first Executive Director of the International Corporate Governance Network.
Anne taught for some years with Ira Millstein on ‘The Role of the Corporation in Society’, as a Senior Faculty Fellow and Lecturer, at the Yale School of Management. She read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Hilda’s College, Oxford University, where she was awarded a BA and MA, plus a Slater Fellowship at Wellesley College, Massachusetts.