Rising star in quant finance

Leif B. G. Andersen is the Global Co-Head of The Quantitative Strategies Group at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and CMU’s Tepper School of Business. He holds MSc's in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark, an MBA from University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD in Finance from Aarhus Business School. He was the co-recipient of Risk Magazine’s 2001 Quant of the Year Award, and has worked for more than 20 years as a quantitative researcher in the derivatives pricing area. He has authored influential research papers and books in all areas of quantitative finance, and is an Associate Editor of Journal of Computational Finance.

Alexandre Antonov received his PhD degree from the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1997. He worked for Numerix during 1998-2017, then in Standard Chartered bank in London as a director. Currently, he is a Quantitative research and development lead at ADIA

His activity is concentrated on modeling and numerical methods for interest rates, cross currency, credit and XVA, as well as Machine Learning and its applications. AA is an author for multiple publications in mathematical finance and a frequent speaker at financial conferences.

He has received a Quant of Year Award of Risk magazine in 2016.

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, Chairman, Capital Fund Management (Risk.net's 2017 Quant of the Year & Buy-Side Quant of the Year 2018)

Jean-Philippe is Chairman and Chief Scientist. He supervises our research department with Marc and maintains strong links between our research team and the academic world. He is also a professor at Ecole Polytechnique where he teaches Statistical Mechanics and a course on "Complex Systems". He joined CFM in 1994.

Quant of the Year 2017 - https://www.risk.net/risk-magazine/analysis/2479713/quant-of-the-year-jean-philippe-bouchaud

Buy-Side quant of the Year 2018 - https://www.risk.net/awards/5364591/buy-side-quant-of-the-year-jean-philippe-bouchaud

Prof. Rama Cont holds the Chair of Mathematical Finance at Imperial College London and is director of the CFM-Imperial Institute of Quantitative Finance since 2012, after previous appointments at Ecole Polytechnique (France), Columbia University (New York) and Sorbonne (Paris).

His research in finance has focused on modeling of extreme market risks: market discontinuities and breakdowns, liquidity risk, endogenous risk and systemic risk. His 2006 paper on ‘model risk', an early reference on the topic, was the first to propose a quantitative approach to model risk.

Cont has served as a consultant to the BIS, the European Central Bank, the New York Federal Reserve, Norges Bank, the US Commodity Futures Commission (CFTC), the US Office of Financial Research, the IMF and a dozen major CCPs in Europe, Asia, the US and Latin America.

He was awarded the Louis Bachelier Prize by the French Academy of Sciences in 2010 and the Royal Society Award for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Research in 2017 for his research on mathematical modeling in finance.

George Hong is head of platform and quants at Credit Suisse, based in Hong Kong. He holds an B.A. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Mathematical Finance from Cambridge University.

Dr Blanka Horvath is an associate professor in mathematical and computational finance at the University of Oxford. Blanka’s current research interests evolve around a new generation of option pricing models (Rough Stochastic Volatility models), and their asymptotic and numerical properties. Prior to her current appointment, she was at ETH Zurich, specialising in functional analytic and numerical properties of SABR-type stochastic models. Blanka holds a PhD in Mathematical Finance from ETH Zurich, a Diploma in Mathematics from the University of Bonn and an MSc in Economics from the University of Hong Kong.

Alexander Lipton is global head, research & development at Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, professor of practice at Khalifa University, visiting professor and Dean’s Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Connection Science Fellow at MIT, and advisory board member at ADIA Lab.

Alex is a co-founder of Sila, a company providing digital wallet & ACH payment services, and an advisory board member at several fintech companies worldwide. From 2006–2016, Alex was co-head of the global quantitative group and quantitative solutions executive at Bank of America. Earlier, he was a senior manager at Citadel, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Bankers Trust. In addition, Alex held visiting professorships at EPFL, NYU, Oxford University, Imperial College, and the University of Illinois.

Before becoming a quant, Alex was a full professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois and a consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1984 Alex received the Best Young Geophysicist Award from the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Risk Magazine awarded him the Inaugural Quant of the Year Award in 2000 and the Buy-side Quant of the Year Award in 2021.

Alex authored/edited twelve books and over a hundred scientific papers on nuclear fusion, astrophysics, applied mathematics, financial engineering, and distributed ledgers.

Currently, Alex is an associate editor of several journals covering quantitative finance. He frequently gives keynote presentations on quantitative finance and FinTech at conferences and forums worldwide. Alex published several general interest articles in such publications as Scientific American, Barron’s, the Hill, and others. In addition, he is an avid collector and researcher of military optics.

Vladimir Piterbarg is the global head of Quantitative Analytics at NatWest Markets since 2018. He held similar positions at Rokos Capital Management LLP, Barclays Capital/Barclays investment bank, and Bank of America. Vladimir Piterbarg has a PhD in Mathematics (Stochastic Calculus) from the University of Southern California. He serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Computational Finance and the Journal of Investment Strategies. Together with Leif Andersen, Vladimir Piterbarg wrote the authoritative, three-volume set of books “Interest Rate Modelling”. He published multiple papers in various areas of quantitative finance, and won Risk Magazine’s Quant of the Year award twice.

Gordon Ritter completed his PhD in mathematical physics at Harvard University in 2007. His publications while at Harvard were in quantum field theory, differential geometry, quantum computation and abstract algebra, including a well-known simplicity theorem for Kac-Moody groups and a mathematically rigorous treatment of Euclidean QFT on Riemannian manifolds. Prior to Harvard he earned his Bachelor’s degree with honors in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. Dr. Ritter currently teaches at Columbia, NYU, University of Chicago and the Baruch MFE program. His academic research is on portfolio optimization and statistical machine learning; his finance publications can be found in journals including Risk, the Journal of Portfolio Management, Journal of Financial Data Science, European Journal of Operations Research, Journal of Machine Learning in Finance, and others. He was named Buy-Side Quant of the Year in 2019 (researchers awarded the same honor in other years included Marcos Lopez de Prado, Alex Lipton, and Jean-Phillipe Bouchaud). In parallel with his teaching responsibilities, Dr. Ritter works full time in the industry. In 2019 he founded Ritter Alpha LP, a registered investment adviser running systematic absolute-return trading strategies across multiple asset classes and geographies, based on cutting-edge technology and rigorous applications of statistics and the scientific method to investment problems. Prior to founding Ritter Alpha, he built a successful trading system from scratch at GSA Capital, a firm which won the Equity Market Neutral & Quantitative Strategies category at the Eurohedge awards four times. Prior to GSA, Dr. Ritter was a Vice President of Highbridge Capital Management (HCM) and a core member of the HCM statistical arbitrage group, a small team sharing full discretion over systematic trading models that generated billions in profit for investors and directed trillions of dollars of trades across global equities, futures and options. Several senior members of the HCM statistical arbitrage group later joined Gordon at Ritter Alpha. In his spare time Gordon enjoys scuba diving in Hawaii. Diving certifications include Master Scuba Diver (PADI and NAUI), SDI Solo Diver, TDI Advanced Nitrox & Decompression procedures, and PADI Tec 40 CCR.

Mathieu Rosenbaum is a full professor at École Polytechnique, where he holds the chair “Analytics and Models for Regulation”

and is co-head of the quantitative finance (El Karoui) master program. His research mainly focuses on statistical finance problems, regulatory issues and risk management of derivatives.

He published more than 80 articles on these subjects and supervised about 20 PhD students.

He is notably a renowned experts on the quantitative analysis of market microstructure and high frequency trading.

Mathieu Rosenbaum is also at the origin (with Jim Gatheral and Thibault Jaisson) of the development of rough volatility models.

He is one of the editors in chief of the journal “Market Microstructure and Liquidity“ and is associate editor for 10 other journals.

Furthermore, he received the Europlace Award for Best Young Researcher in Finance in 2014, the European Research Council Grant in 2016, the Louis Bachelier prize in 2020 and the Quant of the Year award in 2021.

Sandrine Ungari is currently head of cross-asset quantitative research team at Société Générale. Within the cross-asset research group, the quantitative research team is active in systematic strategies, derivatives and structured products, portfolio risk modelling, and provides research to investors worldwide. The group has been recognised as a market leader in quantitative research and was ranked #1 in the Pan-European Institutional Investor survey. Sandrine is a graduate of ENSTA (Paris) and hold a master’s in quantitative finance from Paris VI University. 

Dr. Dario Villani is CEO and Co-Founder of Duality Group. Dario has managed multi-billion dollar portfolios within credit, interest rates, and commodities. Previously, he served as Global Head of Portfolio Strategy and Risk at Tudor Investment Corporation. He shared the 2016 Risk.net Buy-Side Quant of the Year Award, and has authored research papers in finance, theoretical physics, statistics and portfolio management. Dario holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Salerno University and a Master in Finance from Princeton University where he also taught a popular course in trading and risk management.