BIO’s for Program Speakers
 

Michael Barnes is a founding Partner of Tricadia Capital LLC, a New York based asset management firm focused on fixed income credit arbitrage strategies, particularly those relating to structured credit products. Tricadia currently has approximately $5 billion of assets under management. Prior to the formation of Tricadia, Mr. Barnes spent two years as Head of Structured Credit Arbitrage within UBS Principal Finance LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of UBS Warburg which conducted proprietary trading on behalf of the firm. Mr. Barnes joined UBS in November 2000 as part of the merger between UBS and PaineWebber Inc. Prior to joining UBS, Mr. Barnes was Managing Director and Global Head of the Structured Credit Products Group of PaineWebber. Prior to joining PaineWebber in 1999, he spent 12 years at Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc., the last five of which, he was head of their Structured Transactions Group. Mr. Barnes received his A.B. from Columbia College.

Paul Glasserman is the Jack R. Anderson Professor of Finance at Columbia University, Graduate School of Business. He is an expert of worldwide renown in the application of Monte Carlo methods to derivative valuation and risk management. Paul has published over ten articles in the leading quantitative finance journals, several insightful book chapters, and a cited text, “Monte Carlo Methods in Financial Engineering.” He has won awards for his research and helps edit several prestigious journals. Recently, Paul has applied his skills to credit risk and credit derivatives, and spoken about that work at several professional conferences. He earned his PhD from Harvard.

Howard B. Hill is a Managing Director at Babson Capital and is a member of the firm’s Quantitative Management Group. He is responsible for the creation of investment vehicles focused on MBS, ABS and CMBS. Howard has over 21 years of industry experience. Prior to joining Babson Capital in 2005, he held positions at the Dutch bank, NIB Capital, NV, where he was a key member of the US structured products investment team. His career on Wall Street includes the founding of groups or departments at four primary dealers, including establishment of the global Securitized Products Department for Deutsche Bank, the MBS Department of Daiwa Securities, the Mortgage Finance Department of UBS Securities, and the Financial Strategies Group (fixed income research and structuring) of Prudential Securities. He is credited with a number of marketplace innovations, including the first Super PO CMO, the first ABS backed by policyholder loans, the first Z-PAC CMO, the first re-REMIC (CBO), and the first multi-family loan CMO. Howard holds an A.B. in Mathematics from Yale University.

Todd Kushman is a Managing Director with Bear Stearns, responsible for structuring and marketing Derivatives referencing Structured Products. Prior to joining Bear Stearns, Mr. Kushman led the credit and risk management functions for CDOs and Credit Derivatives at Commerzbank N.A. and was responsible for underwriting synthetic CDOs at ACE Capital Re. Mr. Kushman received a B.S.B.A in Accounting from The Ohio State University and an MBA in Finance/Media Management from Fordham University. Mr. Kushman is a Certified Public Accountant.

David Mengle is Head of Research at the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc. in New York, with responsibility for ISDA’s education, survey, and risk management research activities. He developed and now teaches the ISDA Fundamentals of Derivatives seminars, along with more specialized seminars on credit, commodity, and equity derivatives. In addition to ISDA seminars, he teaches courses in economics and risk management at the Fordham University Graduate School of Business. (David is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Finance at Fordham.) Prior to joining ISDA in November 2001, Mr. Mengle worked in the Derivatives Strategies Group at J.P. Morgan in New York. Before that, he was a research economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, specializing in bank regulation, payment system risk, and market value accounting. Mengle holds an A.B. from The Citadel. Following military service, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles. While completing his doctoral work, Mr. Mengle taught economics at Occidental College in Los Angeles and served on the Los Angeles City Council staff.

Luis Reyna is Senior Vice-President with Structured Credit at Swiss Re and has extensive experience in quantitative pricing. During his 10 years at IBM, he was a manager of computational methods in applied mathematics. Luis also worked at Moody’s where he developed the binominal methodology for rating CDOs. Luis then worked at Merrill Lynch for 8 years where he designed original models for pricing baskets, default swaps and options on default swaps and also structured CDO transactions, including ABS, emerging market and middle market CDOs. Luis has a Ph.D in Applied Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology.

Kristian Rydqvist is the Zurack Professor of Finance and Economics at SUNY Binghamton. He is a recognized expert in the areas of auctions, voting rights, corporate finance, and financial markets, with over a dozen published articles in journals such as Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Political Economy, and Journal of Banking and Finance. Kristian earned his PhD from the Stockholm School of Economics.

Kimberly A. Summe is the General Counsel at the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc. Ms. Summe joined ISDA in July 2000. She previously worked as an associate at Pillsbury Madison & Sutro in San Francisco and Sullivan & Cromwell in New York. At each firm she engaged in transactional and regulatory work for financial institutions. Ms. Summe serves as Co-Chair of the American Bar Association Section of International Law International Financial Products and Services Committee for the term running from August 2005 to August 2006. Ms. Summe received a Master of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws from Cambridge University and a Juris Doctorate from The University of Chicago Law School. She also has a Master of Science (Econ.) from The London School of Economics and a Bachelor of Arts in History and French from Oklahoma State University. She has published over a dozen articles relating to the regulatory aspects of banking laws in the U.S. and Europe. In addition, she serves on the Board of Governors for Opportunity International, a microfinance organization.

Rangarajan ("Raghu") Sundaram is Yamaichi Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Finance at New York University's Stern School of Business; and the Coordinator of the PhD program for the finance department at the Stern School. His research in finance covers a range of areas including derivatives pricing, credit risk & credit derivatives, agency problems, executive compensation and corporate finance. He has also published extensively in mathematical economics, decision theory, and game theory. Professor Sundaram’s research has appeared in Econometrica, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Derivatives, Journal of Fixed Income, and other journals. He received the Jensen Award in 2001 from the Journal of Financial Economics for the best paper in corporate finance published in 2000. Professor Sundaram is the author of “A First Course in Optimization Theory” (currently in its second printing). He is Co-Editor of the Journal of Derivatives and is or has been a member of other Editorial Boards, including that of the Journal of Economic Theory from 1993 to 2002. Before joining the Stern School, he was a tenured Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester, and earned a PhD in Economics from Cornell University.

Suresh M. Sundaresan is the Chase Manhattan Bank Professor of Economics and Finance at Columbia University, and he is currently the Chairman of the Finance subdivision. He has published in many areas of finance, including Treasury auctions, default risk, pensions, risk management, and asset, fixed income, and derivative pricing. His research appears in major journals such as the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Business, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, European Economic Review, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Journal of Political Economy. Suresh has also contributed articles in Financial Times, and World Bank Conferences, and he is an associate editor of Journal of Finance and Review of Derivatives Research. His current research focus is on default risk and how its affects asset pricing and sovereign debt securities, and his consulting work focuses on term structure models, swap pricing models, credit risk models, valuation, and risk management. He has consulted for Morgan Stanley Asset Management and Ernst and Young, and has conducted training programs for leading investment banks including, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, CSFB and Lehman Brothers. Suresh is the author of the text “Fixed-Income Markets and Their Derivatives,” and he has served on the Treasury Bond Markets Advisory Committee.

Hung Q. Tran is Deputy Director of the International Capital Markets Department at the International Monetary Fund. Among other duties, he is responsible for the Global Financial Stability Report, a semi-annual publication of the IMF to provide a regular assessment of global financial markets and to identify potential systemic weaknesses that could lead to crises. Prior to joining the IMF in October 2001, Mr. Tran was Managing Director of Global Research/Chief Economist for Rabobank International (London) and Deutsche Bank (New York, Frankfurt, and Singapore). He was also a senior research executive for Solomon Brothers and Merrill Lynch (both in New York).

Liuren Wu is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College. He is a prolific young researcher, having published over a dozen articles in books and journals, such as Journal of Financial Economics and Journal of Derivatives, in less than eight years as a professor. Recently, Liuren has written several papers related to credit risk and credit default swaps, with co-authors including Peter Carr, Ren-raw Chen, and Frank Zhang. Liuren has an M.Phil Degree in Finance from NYU, and a Chemistry PhD from Chinese Academy of Sciences.
 

 
Moderators and Additional Participants
 

Ren-Raw Chen is an Associate Professor of Finance and Economics at Rutgers Business School. His interests include pricing and hedging derivative contracts within the stochastic interest rate environment, pricing and hedging mortgage backed securities, risk management, and analysis of financial markets. He has published in Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Futures Markets, Journal of Fixed Income, Journal of Derivatives, and others. Ren-Raw has a PhD in Finance from the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign.

Ann Lee has spent seven years as a trader for hedge funds and over ten years in finance. Presently she is on the Advisory Board for Baron Group, a merchant bank with offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and New York and working as an adjunct professor teaching graduate finance at Pace University. Before that, she was the Head of the Global Convertible Fund for Ritchie Capital Management, a $5B multi-strategy hedge fund firm where she managed and traded a portfolio of securities that included bank debt, credit derivatives, structured products, and sovereign debt. Prior to her role at Ritchie, she was a partner at Forest Investment Management, where she generated almost fifty percent of the profits in 2003 for a $1.5B dollar fund trading mostly distressed debt securities and equity derivatives. Ann also co-managed a multi-billion dollar directional convertible arbitrage portfolio for Symphony Asset Management, a hedge fund firm with over $5B in assets, helping the fund outperform the Goldman Sachs convertible bond index by over 20% during her tenure there. Ann graduated magna cum laude from U.C. Berkeley in three years, studied International Relations at the Woodrow Wilson School as a Ford Foundation Fellow, and received a Masters in Business from Harvard Business School.

Anlong Li is Head of Quantitative Research for Credit Trading at Barclays Capital. He has 15 years trading and research experience in derivatives including fixed-income, equity, energy, credit and ABS. Mr. Li started his Wall Street career on the swap desk at Lehman Brothers, was a Vice President in Derivatives Research at Salomon Brothers, First Vice President and Head of Derivatives Modelling at First Chicago, Senior Vice President and U.S. Head of Structured Product Trading at ABM AMRO, Director in Quantitative Research at Citadel Investment Group, and Managing Director and Head of Research at XL Weather and Energy. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Financial Engineering Program at Columbia University. He has a PhD in Operation Research from Case Western Reserve University.

Pamela C. Moulton is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Fordham University. Her research analyzes liquidity in fixed income, equity, and foreign exchange markets, and her work has been published in the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Fixed Income. Prior to joining Fordham, Pamela worked in Fixed Income Research on Wall Street for fourteen years, most recently at Deutsche Bank, where she was a Managing Director and Global Co-Head of Fixed Income and Relative Value Research. She has also worked as a Managing Director and Senior Economist at the New York Stock Exchange. Pamela earned her PhD from Columbia University.