THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO - Key Persons
Alex worked in the finance industry from 1986 to 2015, when he began his teaching career. Currently he is an Instructor in the Financial Mathematics Program on financial regulation and risk management. He also is Lecturer at the UCLA School of Law and UCLA's Anderson School of Management, where he teaches in its Master of Financial Engineering program. His book, Bank Regulation, Risk Management, and Compliance, published in 2019, drew much its material and its key concepts from his work in designing his FINM course. His second book, Anti-Money Laundering Regulation and Compliance: Key Problems and Practice Areas, is scheduled for publication in June 2021. Alex spent most of his career in finance at Moody's Investors Service. At Moody's, in his last position he headed Global Covenant Research, which publishes reports on legal protections in leveraged finance transactions. He was also Senior Credit Officer in Moody's Structured Finance Group, where he rated a wide variety of traditional and esoteric asset classes and bank-supported liquidity structures. He also served as Moody's Global Ratings Compliance Officer for Structured Finance. In this role, he helped design and implement a first-of-its-kind ratings compliance system to address conflicts in the credit ratings process in the aftermath of the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals. Prior to Moody's, he was a Branch Chief in Trading Practices at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C. He began his law career in New York, specializing in secured lending, bankruptcy issues, and bank regulatory matters. Alex holds an AB from Harvard University, an MA from Columbia University, and a JD from Emory University School of Law, where he was Executive Articles Editor of the Emory Law Journal.
Job Titles:
- Trader at Chicago Trading Company
Alex Popovici is a senior quantitative trader at Chicago Trading Company, a proprietary trading firm with offices in Chicago, New York and London.
His focus is on quantitative trading and research in credit markets, including systematic market making, credit ETF/index basis strategies, capital structure arbitrage and credit portfolio risk management.
He has served as senior trader & researcher at various hedge funds in Chicago, London and New York and has 20+ years of experience in quantitative trading.
Alex holds an MSc + PhD in Mathematics from University of Bonn/Germany and an MSc in Financial Mathematics from University of Paris VI/France.
Job Titles:
- Researcher at Jump Trading
Brian Boonstra is a researcher at Jump Trading, a proprietary algorithmic trading firm based in Chicago. He has served as senior or chief quant at Cognitive Capital, UBS O'Connor, Delaware Street Capital, JPMorgan and Helios, and has been teaching at the graduate level since 1996. He managed Thureos Capital, a hedge fund dedicated to equity/credit arbitrage using contingent claims models, and has worked in most areas of contingent claims modeling and trading. His interests include numerical analysis, contingent claims pricing models, and statistical learning. Brian holds an S.B. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Complex Analysis from the University of Michigan.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director of Academic Services and Administration
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director of Academic Services and Administration
Job Titles:
- Chief of Staff
- Deputy Director
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor in the Finance Department at Brigham Young University
Ian Wright is an assistant professor in the finance department at Brigham Young University. He is currently the undergraduate finance program director at BYU, advises financial services clubs, oversees the student run investment funds, and teaches courses in the areas of international finance, asset management, investments/financial markets and professional development. Prior to coming to BYU, he was a quantitative macro investor in a $20 billion fund at BlackRock in London, where he invested across asset classes and regions. Preceding that he was an executive director/vice president in the asset allocation research group in the macro department at Goldman Sachs in London, where he had primary responsibility for Scandinavia, Benelux, Ireland and Korea.
Ian graduated with his Ph.D. from the Department of Economics at Stanford University, focusing on macro-finance and econometrics. His dissertation focused on both theoretical and empirical work pertaining to financial markets. Specifically, he wrote on the dynamics of corporate lending markets, how social interactions influence speculative behavior, and how different horizons of uncertainty differentially affect firm investment behavior. His research has subsequently been published in outlets such as the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. In addition, Wright served as a research assistant to the Working Group on Economic Policy at the Hoover Institution during most of his Ph.D. and was a co-editor of the book Government Policies and the Delayed Economic Recovery. He has also won multiple awards for his teaching in both undergraduate and graduate programs.
As an undergraduate, Ian attended Brigham Young University, where he earned a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Economics with Honors and graduated with the Orson Pratt Prize, which is given to the top senior undergraduate mathematics student.
Joanna is a third year PhD student in the Joint Program in Financial Economics. Her research focuses on climate finance, asset pricing and monetary policy. In addition to research and teaching, she organizes the Booth Finance Brownbag and leads the Fama Miller Research Professional Seminar. Prior to the PhD program, she worked as a full-time research associate in the Finance Division at Columbia Business School and as a trader at an investment bank. She earned a BA in Economics and Statistics from the University of Chicago in 2017.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director of Career Development
Lek-Heng is a professor in the Computational and Applied Mathematics Initiative and the Department of Statistics. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, he was a Morrey assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Ph.D. in Computational and Mathematical Engineering from Stanford University. Lek-Heng began teaching a course on unsupervised learning, FINM 33180, in the MSFM Program in 2015.
Job Titles:
- Associate Senior Instructional Professor
- Director of the Financial Mathematics Program Associate Senior Instructional Professor
Mark Hendricks is an Associate Senior Instructional Professor in the Department of Mathematics and as the Director of Financial Mathematics, he manages all aspects of the program. His industry experience includes quantitative research, systematic trading, risk management, for hedge funds and asset managers. Mark also has been a consultant and adviser for firms in trading, private equity, and data analysis.
Mark has taught courses, reviews, and workshops at the graduate level for Financial Math, the Booth School of Business, and the Department of Economics. He has taught portfolio and risk management, asset pricing, valuation, and data analysis, among other things. Mark's courses emphasize active learning with application and data.
As a Ph.D. candidate for Financial Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School and Department of Economics, Mark won awards including a Stevanovich Fellowship and Lee Prize. Mark holds an M.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Mathematics.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director of Career Development
Job Titles:
- Director of Academic Services and Administration
Job Titles:
- Founding Director of the Financial Mathematics Program at the Unviersity of Chicago
- Professor
Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago since 1982. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Niels taught at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT. Professor Nygaard was the Director of the Financial Mathematics Program since its inception in 1996 until April 2010. Besides his interest in Financial Mathematics he has done research in Arithmetic, Algebraic Geometry and Number Theory.
Prof. Nygaard is the Founding Director of the Financial Mathematics program at the Unviersity of Chicago.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Mathematics
- Faculty Director
Roger Lee is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. He serves on the editorial boards of leading journals in financial mathematics, and is a frequent speaker at academic and practitioner conferences. His research interests include the pricing and hedging of financial derivatives. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford and a B.A. from Harvard.
Roger has taught in the MSFM Program since 2004. He currently teaches FINM 32000 and FINM 33000, and serves as co-organizer of the Project Lab and Faculty Director for the program.
Job Titles:
- Director of Career Development