Presenter’s Bios

Andrew Lo, MIT Sloan School of Management
Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor, a Professor of Finance, and the Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Lo’s current research spans three areas: evolutionary models of investor behavior and adaptive markets, quantitative models of financial markets, and healthcare finance. Recent projects include: an evolutionary explanation for bias and discrimination, and how to reduce their effects; a new analytical framework for measuring the impact of impact investing; and new statistical tools for predicting clinical trial outcomes, incorporating patient preferences into the drug approval process, and accelerating biomedical innovation via novel business and financing structures.

Lo has published extensively in academic journals (see http://alo.mit.edu) and his most recent book is Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought. His awards include Batterymarch, Guggenheim, and Sloan Fellowships; the Paul A. Samuelson Award; the Eugene Fama Prize; the IAFE-SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year; the Global Association of Risk Professionals Risk Manager of the Year; the Harry M. Markowitz Award; the Managed Futures Pinnacle Achievement Award; one of TIME’s “100 most influential people in the world”; and awards for teaching excellence from both Wharton and MIT. His book Adaptive Markets has also received a number of awards, listed here. He is a Fellow of Academia Sinica; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Econometric Society; and the Society of Financial Econometrics.

Lo is also a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, an affiliated faculty member of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a member of the New York Federal Reserve Board’s Financial Advisory Roundtable, FINRA’s Economic Advisory Committee, the National Academy of Sciences Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Board of Overseers, and the boards of Roivant Sciences and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Lo holds a BA in economics from Yale University and an AM and PhD in economics from Harvard University.

Lisa Goldberg, Aperio by BlackRock and University of California, Berkeley
CDAR co-Director Lisa Goldberg is Professor of the Practice of Economics at University of California, Berkeley and Head of Research at Aperio Group, now part of BlackRock. 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.

Robert Engle, New York University
Robert Engle was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economics for his research on the concept of autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH). He developed this method for statistical modeling of time-varying volatility and demonstrated that these techniques accurately capture the properties of many time series. Professor Engle shared the prize with Clive W. J. Granger of the University of California at San Diego.

Professor Engle is an expert in time series analysis with a long-standing interest in the analysis of financial markets. His ARCH model and its generalizations have become indispensable tools not only for researchers, but also for analysts of financial markets, who use them in asset pricing and in evaluating portfolio risk. His research has also produced such innovative statistical methods as cointegration, common features, autoregressive conditional duration (ACD), CAViaR and now dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) models.

He is currently the Co-Director of the NYU Stern Volatility and Risk Institute and is the Co-Founding President of the Society for Financial Econometrics (SoFiE), a global non-profit organization housed at NYU. Before joining NYU Stern in 2000, Professor Engle was Chancellor’s Associates Professor and Economics Department Chair at the University of California, San Diego, and Associate Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He received his bachelor of science in physics from Williams College and his master of science in physics and doctor of philosophy in economics from Cornell University. Born in Syracuse, NY, he grew up in Media, Pennsylvania, spent 25 years in San Diego, and now lives in New York.

Seoyoung Kim, Santa Clara University
Seoyoung Kim is an Associate Professor of Finance and Business Analytics at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, where she teaches Financial Management, Financial Engineering, and FinTech.

Professor Kim’s expertise lies in innovative financial instruments. 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 and asset backed securities. Her expertise extends to crypto-assets, NFTs, and other blockchain-based and blockchain-adjacent ventures – on which she has consulted and written extensively, including her most recent books: NFTs For Dummies and DeFi For Dummies.

Prior to joining Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, Professor Kim held a faculty appointment at Purdue University. She holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Rice University and Ph.D. in Finance from Emory University.

Ben Meng, Franklin Templeton
Ben Meng is executive vice president, chairman of Asia Pacific, and the executive sponsor of Sustainability for Franklin Templeton. In this role, Dr. Meng is responsible for expanding the firm’s investment offerings and client reach in the Asia Pacific region, with a particular focus on leading the private equity, venture capital and other alternative asset investment capabilities.
Additionally, Dr. Meng leads Franklin Templeton’s China business, including our joint ventures and Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise. He also supports efforts to expand the reach of Franklin Templeton’s tailored solutions for the firm’s institutional clients globally. Dr. Meng reports to the CEO and is a member of Franklin Templeton’s Executive Committee, a small group of the company’s top leaders responsible for shaping the firm’s overall strategy.

Dr. Meng has more than two decades of experience working in the global finance industry across three continents, including extensive experience in Asia Pacific, as well as a strong track record for delivering results across a broad range of asset classes. He has served in top investment roles at two of the largest asset owners in the world. Previously, Dr. Meng was Chief Investment Officer for the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and Deputy Chief Investment Officer at the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE). Most recently, he served as Director of Eight Sequoias LLC, an independent firm providing consulting services to the financial industry.
Dr. Meng holds a Master of Financial Engineering degree from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Davis. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Investment Management and frequently teaches at top business schools globally such as the Haas School of Business, where he received the 2014 Cheit Award of Excellence in Teaching. He is the Citi Visiting Chair in International Business at the Schwarzman College. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Committee of 100.

Jay Raol, Invesco
Jay Raol is Director of Quantitative Research for the systematic and factor investing group within Invesco Fixed Income (IFI). In this role, he leads a team that researches and manages systematic and factor based strategies in global fixed income and currency markets. He previously had responsibilities in quantitative macroeconomic strategy, portfolio construction and risk management.

Mr. Raol joined Invesco’s risk management group in 2011, where he ran the risk analytics function for several large equity funds. Mr. Raol has been in the industry since 2010. His experience has spanned across functions including quantitative macroeconomic analysis, portfolio construction and risk management.

Mr. Raol earned a BA degree and a PhD in computational and applied mathematics from Rice University in Houston, Texas.