Presenter’s Bios
Mike Bessell, Invesco
Mike Bessell is a Managing Director, and the European and Global Investment Strategist at Invesco Real Estate. Mike is responsible for the strategic outlook across our European markets and products. He also coordinates our global strategic efforts, including our strategic analytics initiatives, which focus on data analytics and the development of analytic tools to support our global investment teams.
Mike began his investment career in 2001 and joined Invesco Real Estate in 2018. Prior to joining Invesco Real Estate, Mike worked for Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofAML) for five years, where he was head of real estate equity research for the EMEA region. In this leading role, he and his team published research on listed real estate stocks across the UK, Europe, MENA and South Africa. Before BofAML, Mike was a research analyst covering UK real estate and housebuilders for Investec, having previously been a UK equity fund manager at Standard Life Investments in Edinburgh.
Mike earned a Master of Arts (First Class) in Financial Economics from the University of St Andrews and is a Chartered Financial Analyst® (CFA) charterholder. At Invesco Real Estate, Europe, Mike chairs the Fund Steering Committee and co-chairs the Investment Strategy Group. He is based in the London office.
David Booth, Dimensional Fund Advisors
David Booth is Chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors, a firm he founded in 1981. Under David’s leadership, Dimensional has grown from a fledgling business operating out of the spare room of his Brooklyn brownstone apartment to a global investment manager with more than 1,500 employees and $853 billion (USD) in assets under management. David led Dimensional as CEO and later Co-CEO until 2017, when he stepped back from the daily management of the firm. He remains closely involved in strategic initiatives at Dimensional.
A trailblazer in the financial world, David helped create one of the world’s first index funds in the 1970s and launched the first passively managed small company strategy in the early ’80s. He has spent his career applying groundbreaking financial theory and research to the practical world of asset management, working closely with renowned academics to develop innovative investment strategies that he believed could outperform index funds, pioneering what would later be called factor investing.
David received a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1968 and a master’s degree in business in 1969 from the University of Kansas. In 1971, he received an MBA from the University of Chicago. Over the years, David has been a benefactor to both schools. Upon announcing a gift from the Booth family to the business school at Chicago in 2008, David cited his education there as being instrumental to his later success with Dimensional. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business is named in David’s honor, and the gift has helped to advance its field-defining research and to support the school’s faculty, a number of whom have had close ties to Dimensional. David has also donated to support athletics at the University of Kansas—as a boy, he ushered there at football games—and he is a vocal advocate of the role sports play in keeping alumni connected to a school.
Keith Brown, University of Texas at Austin
Keith Brown holds the positions of University Distinguished Teaching Professor and Fayez Sarofim Fellow at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, where he specializes in teaching Investments, Portfolio Management and Security Analysis, Capital Markets, and Derivatives courses at the BBA and MBA levels. He is also a member of the University’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers. For eleven years, he served as President and Chief Executive Officer of The MBA Investment Fund LLC, a private complex of equity and fixed-income portfolios managed by graduate students at the University of Texas and also was the Director of the Department of Finance’s Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst Center for Private Equity Finance.
Keith is the co-founder and Senior Partner of Fulcrum Financial Group, a portfolio management, investment advisory, and business valuation firm located in Austin, Texas and Las Vegas, Nevada. Keith currently is Advisor to the Board of Trustees of Teacher Retirement System of Texas and to the Board of Directors of University of Texas Investment Management Company. He also serves as Associate Editor for Journal of Behavioral Finance and Journal of Investment Management and formerly held the position of Research Director for the Research Foundation of the Association for Investment Management and Research.
For more information on Keith’s research and professional background, please follow the link to view a biographical sketch and curriculum vitae.
Gerard Garvey, BlackRock
Gerald Garvey is head of Sustainability Research for Blackrock Systematic. He has worked in alpha research since 2004 and prior to that was an academic at the University of British Columbia, Sydney University and the University of New South Wales. His research has been published in many refereed journals including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, International Economic Review, Journal of Portfolio Management and Journal of Investment Management.
John M. Griffin, University of Texas at Austin
John M. Griffin is a professor of finance and the James A. Elkins Centennial Chair in Finance at The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. Griffin is a leading forensic finance expert, specializing in understanding the role of potentially illegal, illicit, or immoral actions in financial markets. His research has analyzed potential fraud related to cryptocurrencies, the Paycheck Protection Program, CMBS/MBS, CLOs, the 2008-2009 financial crisis, bonds and structured finance products, credit ratings, derivatives, insider trading, market manipulation, investment bank disclosures, financial market anomalies, and hedge funds.
Griffin has taught courses on investments, international finance, and asset pricing for undergraduate and doctoral students at McCombs since 2004. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, the Yale School of Management, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he has taught courses on international finance and investment management to undergraduate, MBA, and doctoral students.
Griffin is the CEO\founder of Integra Research Group, which specializes in forensic investigations and assists in many forensic financial investigations to expose fraud. Griffin and Integra consult for various entities, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, state and federal law enforcement agencies, and the Commody Futures Trading Commission. He is a past president and vice president of the Western Finance Association, one of the leading finance associations, as well as a past president and vice president of the Society for Financial Studies SFS Cavalcade, and a former director of the Financial Management Association and the Western Finance Association.
He has published over 35 papers in the top finance and economics journals and is widely cited. He has over 12,300 Google Scholar citations and over 112,000 from ssrn.com, making him among the top 200 most downloaded SSRN authors. His papers have won top finance awards and are often cited in regulatory rulemaking. His research has been profiled extensively in top media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, CNN, Fortune, Forbes, and over 800 other news outlets around the world.
Griffin earned a B.A. in economics from Baylor University and an M.S. in finance from Texas A&M University. He earned a Ph.D. in finance from Ohio State University.
Matthew Hall, Invesco
Matthew Hall is a Senior Director of European Research and Head of Data Analytics at Invesco Real Estate. Matthew is responsible for the forecasting elements of Invesco Real Estate’s research, along with responsibility for covering the UK, Nordic region, European Hotels and Residential sector market information. In addition, Matthew is responsible for coordinating best practice in data analytics and information dash boarding across the European Real Estate business
Matthew began his investment career in 2000 and joined Invesco Real Estate in 2013. Prior to joining Invesco Real Estate, Matthew was a director and global head of Forecasting at DTZ and managing economist at Experian and an associate director at CBRE. During that time, Matthew has built up experience of UK, European and Global markets in both the commercial and residential sectors. He has also spent four years leading the finance & funding module of the IPF diploma. He has over 20 years of experience. From starting out as a central London office market specialist, he has worked through a variety of roles throughout the real estate research industry, specializing in quantitative roles.
Matthew earned a degree in Anthropology from Durham University, a degree in Economics from Birkbeck University, and a Master’s in Real Estate Finance at the University of Reading. He is based in the London office.
Mark Kritzman, Windham Capital Management
Mark is a Founding Partner and CEO of Windham Capital Management, LLC and the Chairman of Windham’s investment committee. He is responsible for managing research activities and investment advisory services.
Mark is also a Founding Partner of State Street Associates, and he teaches a graduate finance course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served as a Founding Director of the International Securities Exchange and as a Commissioner on the Group Insurance Commission of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He has also served on the Advisory Board of the Government Investment Corporation of Singapore (GIC) and the boards of the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance, The Investment Fund for Foundations, and State Street Associates. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Protego Trust Company, the Advisory Board of the MIT Sloan Finance Group, the Board of Governors of St. John’s University, the Emerging Markets Review, the Journal of Alternative Investments, the Journal of Derivatives, the Journal of Investment Management, where he is Book Review Editor, and The Journal of Portfolio Management.
He has written 90 articles for peer-reviewed journals and is the author or co-author of seven books including A Practitioner’s Guide to Asset Allocation, Puzzles of Finance, and The Portable Financial Analyst. Mark won Graham and Dodd scrolls in 1993 and 2002, the Research Prize from the Institute for Quantitative Investment Research in 1997, the Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award nine times, the Roger F. Murray Prize from the Q-Group in 2012, and the Peter L. Bernstein Award in 2013 for Best Paper in an Institutional Investor Journal. In 2004, Mark was elected a Batten Fellow at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia.
Mark holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from St. John’s University, a Master of Business Administration with distinction from New York University, and a Chartered Financial Analyst® designation. Mark P. Kritzman is a Senior Lecturer in Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Clemens Sialm, University of Texas at Austin
Clemens Sialm is a Professor of Finance at the University of Texas at Austin and holds the Charles E. and Sarah M. Seay Regents Chair in Finance. He is the Chair of the Department of Finance and is the Director of the AIM Investment Center. Sialm is is an Editor at the Review of Financial Studies and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
Sialm received an undergraduate degree (lic. oec.) in Economics from the University of St.Gallen in Switzerland and a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. The University of St.Gallen recently awarded him an honorary doctorate (Dr. oec. h.c.) for his research in the fields of investments, mutual funds, retirement savings, and taxation.
Sialm’s research interests are in the areas of investments, retirement savings, and taxation. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Review of Finance, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Management Science, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Financial Analysts Journal among others. Sialm’s research has been frequently cited in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Economist.
Prior to joining the University of Texas, he taught at Stanford University and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He teaches Financial Management, the core MBA finance class in the Dallas-Fort Worth MBA program. Previously, he taught classes on Investments, Derivatives and Risk Management, and International Economics.
Laura T Starks, University of Texas at Austin
Laura T. Starks, Charles E. and Sarah M. Seay Regents Chair in Finance and co-Executive Director of Social Innovation Initiative at McCombs. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on environmental, social and governance investing, philanthropy, global financial strategies, and other finance topics. She has previously served as interim Dean, Associate Dean for Research, Chairman of the Department of Finance and Graduate Advisor. She was also Editor of the Review of Financial Studies from 2008-2014 and has won a number of research and teaching awards in her career. Her current research focuses on mutual funds, corporate governance institutional investors, molecular genetics and stock market participation, climate risk and environmental, social and governance investing. She has served on the Boards of Directors of the four national academic finance organizations: the American Finance Association, the Financial Management Association (FMA), the Society of Financial Studies (SFS) and the Western Finance Association (WFA). She is past president of the FMA, WFA and SFS and is currently President-Elect for the AFA. She is a past Chairman of the Graduate Assembly for the University of Texas at Austin, the elected faculty council that governs the University’s graduate programs, and served on the Executive Committee of the University Faculty Council. She is an independent director for CREF Retirement Accounts and TIAA-CREF Mutual Funds and previously served on the Investment Advisory Committee for the Employees Retirement System of Texas, the Board of Governors of the Investment Company Institute, and the Governing Council of the Independent Directors Council. She has also served on the 2013 Strategy Council and the 2014 Expert Panel for the Norwegian Government Pension Fund (the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world).
David Turkington, State Street Global Markets
David Turkington is Senior Managing Director and Head of State Street Associates, State Street Global Markets’ decades-long partnership with renowned academics that produces innovative research on markets and investment strategy. David is a frequent presenter at industry conferences, has published more than 30 research articles in a range of journals, and currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Alternative Investments. He is the co-author of three books including “Asset Allocation: From Theory to Practice and Beyond” and the forthcoming “Prediction Revisited: The Importance of Observation.” His published research has received the 2010 Graham and Dodd Scroll Award, five Bernstein-Fabozzi/Jacobs-Levy Outstanding Article Awards, the 2013 Peter L. Bernstein Award for best paper in an Institutional Investor journal, and the 2021 Roger F. Murray First Prize for outstanding research presented at the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance (Q Group) seminars.
David graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University with a BA in mathematics and quantitative economics, and he holds the CFA designation.
Discussants
Vivek Anand, Deutsche Bank
Vivek Anand is the Head of Portfolio Construction for the QIS Research Team at Deutsche Bank. He specialises in designing portfolio overlays and risk modelling. His expertise also includes developing multi-frequency, multi-style, and multi-product systematic trading strategies across various asset classes. Vivek joined Deutsche Bank in 2009 as a Quantitative Strategist in FX. Prior to this, he worked as an Analyst in Market and Credit Risk at Sungard Limited in India. Vivek holds B.Tech and M.Tech degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and the Certificate in Quantitative Finance (CQF).
Vineer Bhansali, LongTail Alpha
Vineer Bhansali is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of LongTail Alpha. His 30 plus year investment career started at Citibank, where he founded and managed the Exotic and Hybrid Options Trading Desk. He later joined Salomon Brothers in its Fixed Income Arbitrage Group, followed by the CSFB Proprietary Trading Group. Dr. Bhansali was at PIMCO for 16 years, serving the last eight years as MD and Head of the Quantitative Portfolios Team, which he founded in 2008. Dr. Bhansali also managed all of PIMCO’s analytics from 2000 to 2010. Among other responsibilities, he was the lead PM for the PIMCO TRENDS Managed Futures Strategy Fund, the PIMCO Tail Risk Hedging Funds, PIMCO RealRetirement and RealPath Funds, and PIMCO’s indexed ETFS. He was also co-PM of the PIMCO Global Multi-Asset Fund, PIMCO Global Relative Value Fund and PIMCO Distressed Senior Credit Opportunities Fund. He has written five books on finance: “Pricing and Managing Exotic and Hybrid Options”; “Fixed Income Finance: A Quantitative Approach”; “Bond Portfolio Investing and Risk Management”, “Tail Risk Hedging”, and his most recent: “The Incredible Upside-Down Fixed-Income Market: Negative Interest Rates and Their Implications” and authored over 30 refereed papers on topics as varied as option pricing, fixed income, tail hedging, asset allocation and economics in leading Journals that include the Journal of Finance, Financial Analysts’ Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management, and Journal of Risk. He has received numerous awards, including the Graham and Dodd Scroll Award and TIME magazine’s college achievement award. Under his leadership, PIMCO received the Risk Manager of the Year Award in the asset-management category in 2002 from Risk Magazine. In its announcement of the award, PIMCO cited “a proprietary system developed in-house by PIMCO’s Vineer Bhansali, Ph.D. and his team.” Dr. Bhansali received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Harvard University in 1992 and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Physics from Caltech in 1987. Vineer is an ultra-marathon runner and has finished the Western States Endurance Run numerous times, including earning the silver buckle in 2014, and also the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, Angeles Crest 100 and Leadville 100, and most recently the Badwater 135 ultramarathon. He has over 5000 hours of flight time in all types of aircraft, including jets and helicopters, and holds the Airline Transport Pilot Rating. He has served on the Investment Committee of the American Physical Society, and currently serves on the Investment Committee of the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, the American Physical Society and on the Boards of the Q Group and the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.
Kaitlin Hendrix, Dimensional
Kaitlin Hendrix is the Asset Allocation Research Director and a Vice President at Dimensional. She conducts research and analyses to evaluate and enhance Dimensional’s investment strategies and conducts empirical research on a variety of investment topics that are useful to clients. Kaitlin leads asset allocation research to develop value-added investment solutions that seek to meet clients’ needs, goals, and preferences in a systematic, reliable, and cost-efficient manner. She is the chair of Dimensional’s Models Committee.
Before joining Dimensional, Kaitlin worked as a consultant with NERA Economic Consulting, where she applied econometric and statistical models in order to perform analyses in connection with securities litigation. Kaitlin has an MSc in financial economics from the University of Oxford and a BA in economics from Washington and Lee University. She is a CFA® charterholder and a member of the CFA Society of Austin.
Sharon Hill, Vanguard
Sharon Hill, Ph.D. is a senior portfolio manager and Head of Alpha Equity – Global & Income within Vanguard’s Quantitative Equity Group. Her team manages active equity global and income-oriented mandates using quantitative methods. Prior to joining Vanguard in 2019, she was Head of Equity Quantitative Research & Analytics at Macquarie Investment Management. Earlier roles include working as a fixed income software developer at Bloomberg L.P. and teaching mathematics at Rowan University. She earned a B.S. in Mathematics from City University of New York at Brooklyn College and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from University of Connecticut.
Dale Rosenthal, Parametric
Dale Rosenthal is a Director of Derivatives Research at Parametric, a Morgan Stanley company. He previously consulted and traded algo Eurodollar futures at his own firm, Q36, and was an assistant professor of finance at UIC. Prior to graduate school, he interned at Goldman Sachs; worked as an equity derivatives strategist at Long-Term Capital Management; and, was a quantitative researcher and proprietary algorithmic trader at Morgan Stanley’s Equity Trading Lab.
His academic research focuses on trading and financial distress using market microstructure and financial econometrics. His work has been published in the Journal of Financial Econometrics and the Journal of Empirical Finance. Since 2009 he has co-organized the Open Source Quant Finance conference. Mr. Rosenthal graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. in electrical engineering and the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in statistics.