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.
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).