UNPARALLELED ACADEMIC AND INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE

Dr. David Shimko

Dr. David Shimko has worked in banking and risk management consulting for over 20 years, providing innovative solutions to risk management problems in risk strategy and hedging, risk policy, performance measurement, and capital management. Clients have included top U.S. banks, proprietary trading shops, pensions, global commodity producers, and numerous non-bank financial institutions including sovereign authorities. He most recently served as CEO of CreditCircle, a marketplace lending startup.

Dr. Shimko’s expertise ranges from risk assessment, risk management strategy, product design, valuation, and expert witness advisory. His work has focused in all asset classes and structures, including exotic and illiquid option products and structures. Dr. Shimko has been awarded three U.S. patents in innovative collateral management techniques.

He is currently an Industry Full Professor of Finance at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering where he teaches Financial Engineering courses including Valuation, Risk Management, and Credit.

Dr. Shimko is widely published, speaks frequently at industry conferences, and has held numerous prestigious academic positions in finance, including adjunct positions at the Kellogg School at Northwestern, the Courant Institute at NYU, and the Harvard Business School. He earned his B.A. in Economics and PhD in Finance from Northwestern University.

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Dr. James Adams

Dr. James Adams, CFA, brings more than 25 years of industry experience to his current positions as Adjunct Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor of Finance at NYU School of Professional Studies. During his tenure at J.P. Morgan as a Managing Director, he led sales and relationship management teams in Derivatives, Rates, Foreign Exchange and Investor Services covering major institutions across the globe and spent several years in Europe covering major multinational corporations. He was also active in recruiting, training and mentoring professionals at J.P. Morgan. Dr. Adams has published peer-reviewed academic articles and global curriculum in corporate finance, derivatives, fixed income and pension risk management.

Dr. Adams earned a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from The Ohio State University and a B.A. in Economics from Wayne State University, and has been a CFA charterholder since 2001. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of two publicly traded Canadian companies (Sokoman Minerals Corporation and Visionstate Corporation).

Dr. Peter Went

Dr. Peter Went, CFA, is on the faculty of the Applied Analytics program at Columbia University's School of Professional Studies, where he teaches courses in data strategy and data science. He brings his expertise in quantitative product management, risk management, FX payment systems, and risk-based capital regulation. As a globally recognized risk management expert, Dr. Went publishes and speaks on risk management, financial regulation, and quantitative analysis topics.

As a member of Woodlands Bank’s Board of Directors, and the Chair of its Governance Committee, Dr. Went led the development of a risk-aware governance framework for the bank, which improved financial performance and increased credibility among investors and regulators. He serves on various for-profit and non-profit boards.

Dr. Went earned a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska, is a civilekonom from Stockholm School of Economics, and is a CFA charterholder.

Brett Friedman

Mr. Friedman has managed risk for over 30 years and has broad experience working with financial institutions in risk management and operations. He has built and managed three risk management organizations from scratch, two trading startups, and has transacted on numerous exchanges and OTC markets, He brings a vast amount of first-hand management, operations, and valuation experience.

Mr. Friedman was formerly the COO/CRO of Brick Accretive Management, an absolute return hedge fund. He was also the Chief Risk Officer of Ospraie Management, an $8 billion natural resource-based hedge fund and private equity group. Mr. Friedman has experience in all asset classes and specializes in options risk, hedging, and valuation.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Friedman served as a Partner at Risk Capital Management, Chief Risk Officer for three energy trading firms, worked for 10 years as a futures and options trader, and traded foreign exchange futures and options for the Union Bank of Switzerland. He started his career at the Federal Reserve Bank of NY.

Mr. Friedman earned a BA in Economics from Columbia University.

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Charles A. Fishkin

Charles A. Fishkin is a risk management expert, adviser, educator and author. With over thirty years of industry experience, he has designed, advised on and implemented risk management programs in global financial services firms, corporations, governmental agencies and non-profit entities. In 2004, he was selected by SEC Chair William Donaldson to create and lead the agency’s new Office of Risk Assessment. Serving as its first Director, he led an agency-wide program to assess complex risks across the securities markets, including issues relating to hedge funds, mutual funds and financial services innovation.

Charles is an adjunct faculty in the financial engineering masters program at Bernard M. Baruch College of The City University of New York. He has been a guest lecturer and speaker at other leading graduate programs, including University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Harvard Business School, MIT, NYU and Wharton.

His writing on risk management has been widely published in industry journals. He is also the author of The Shape of Risk (2006) and co-author of Managing Country Risk in an Age of Globalization (2018), both published by Palgrave Macmillan, an imprint of Springer Nature.

He received a BA in Economics, with General Honors, from The University of Chicago.

Henry L. Lichtenstein

Prior to establishing his energy futures trading and compliance consulting firm Brown Mac Energy LLC in 2012, Henry L. Lichtenstein was First Vice President, Institutional Energy Sales for Newedge USA, LLC, joining Newedge’s predecessor firm, Fimat USA, LLC, in October 1996 as Managing Director of Institutional Sales – Energy where he headed an institutional energy hedge desk. A renowned and respected technical analyst, he has provided professional technical advice to large institutional energy hedge clients since 1983. A lifelong commodity futures professional with an unblemished regulatory record, he has executed well over 20 million energy futures contracts on the NYMEX and ICE for institutional clients and was an early leader in marketing and clearing NYMEX ClearPort Cleared futures contracts. He has lectured on Exchange of Futures for Physicals (EFP) and Technical Analysis of Energy Futures Markets at various conferences. A former NYMEX seat owner and member, he owned a seat on the Kansas City Board of Trade for many years until the exchange was purchased by CME Group, Inc. and he currently is a member of the COMEX.

Henry has a BS from Rutgers University in Agricultural Science and did graduate work at Rutgers in Agricultural Economics and Marketing. He spent three years at Commodity Research Bureau (CRB) as a senior fundamental and technical analyst and was associate editor of the 1980 through 1982 Commodity Year Books. Following CRB, he started a major institutional energy hedge desk at Oppenheimer & Co. in late 1983, moving over to Pru-Bache Securities in 1985 when Oppenheimer sold its commodity sales unit. His team joined Kidder, Peabody & Co. in 1993, and then spent two years at GPR, Inc., an introducing broker, before joining Fimat.

Dr. Ronald Leven

Dr. Leven joined the economics faculty at Duke University in 2018 as a capstone to his 35-year career in the financial markets. In addition to serving as a research strategist at top tier investment banks, he managed a foreign exchange/fixed income hedge fund and helped launch a hedge fund trading stocks and equity options. Among other achievements, he developed currency indices that became the basis for $500 million in exchange traded products and utilized cross-asset correlations to design unique proxy hedging strategies for bank clients.

Recently, Dr. Leven spent three years at Thomson Reuters managing a 20-person team responsible for the foreign exchange and economic content in the firm’s screen-based Eikon financial service and was successful in generating $100 million of subscriber revenues. Dr. Leven also created and published a Thomson Reuters branded monthly commentary, The Market Voice, which he continues to author on a consulting basis and has over 8,000 readers.

Prior to Thomson Reuters, Dr. Leven has held senior research positions at Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan, based at various points in New York, Tokyo and Singapore. He worked at several hedge funds, trading currencies, fixed income, emerging market and equities. His career started at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as an economist focusing on sovereign risk.

Dr. Leven has published extensively, both through investment bank research and in independent journals, notably Euromoney and the New York Fed Quarterly Review. He has frequently been quoted in the press and appeared as a regular guest on Bloomberg TV and MSNBC.

In addition to Duke, Dr Leven has longstanding adjunct relationships with Columbia and New York University. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from Rice University and a B.A. in Economics and Chinese from Washington University.