Rising star in quant finance

Rising star in quant finance

Rising star in quant finance award

Applications are now closed

 

The Rising star in quant finance award recognises new talent in quantitative finance. It will be given to the author or authors who produce the paper which more closely matches the criteria of originality, correctness, relevance and applicability.

 

Eligible candidates:

All education levels are eligible, given the below conditions are met.

To be eligible, candidates holding a PhD should have completed their first PhD no more than four years ago (not before August 2019). Candidates should also have no more than two years of experience in the financial industry.

Each candidate may submit only one paper. A co-authored paper may be submitted only once, by one of the co-authors.

Submissions should refer to a single paper.

 

Submission process:

Candidates are required to submit their paper by completing the application by August 20, 2023.

Candidates will be asked to describe various aspects of their papers (on methodology, results, applicability, and originality among others) and to provide the paper either through a link to its URL or by uploading it.

 

Criteria:

The editorial team and the selection committee will check how closely the papers meet the following criteria.

Originality: how innovative the solution presented in the paper is, in comparison with the existing literature and existing solutions

Correctness: whether the technical (mathematical, statistical, algorithmic) aspects are correctly dealt with.

Relevance: how significant the issue dealt with is to the financial industry and how important it is to find a solution to it

Applicability: how practical the provided solution is, whether enough information to replicate its results is provided and if it is technically possible for a financial institution to implement it.

 

Selection process:

All submissions are examined by the selection committee. The panel is formed by approximately 15 leading academics and industry quants from different continents and with a comprehensive variety of expertise. 

The quant finance team of Risk.net, based on the feedback of the selection committee, will name a shortlist of candidates by the first week of November.

The shortlisted candidates may be required to provide the latest version of their paper, if different from the first, as well as additional information. They should also be available for an interview with a representative of the selection committee, if that will be considered necessary to take a decision.

 

The winner: 

The winner will be invited to the annual Risk Awards ceremony in November to receive the award and join the community of leading finance professionals for the celebrations.

Leif Andersen

Global co-head of the quantitative strategies group & Data Group

Bank of America Merrill Lynch

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

Quantitative research and development lead

ADIA

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.

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Jean-Philippe Bouchaud

Chairman

Capital Fund Management

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

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Rama Cont

Chair of mathematical finance, Mathematical Institute

University of Oxford

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.

 

Paul Glasserman

Professor of business

Columbia University

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Blanka Horvath

Associate professor in mathematical and computational finance

University of Oxford

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.

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George Hong

Head of platform and quants

Credit Suisse

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.

Antoine Jacquier

Director of the MSc in mathematics and finance

Imperial College London

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Oleksiy Kondratyev

Quantitative research & development lead

Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA)

Alexei is Quantitative Research & Development Lead at ADIA.

Formerly a Managing Director and Global Head of Data Analytics at Standard Chartered Bank, Alexei is responsible for providing data analytics services to Corporate, Commercial and Institutional Banking division of Standard Chartered Bank.

He joined Standard Chartered Bank in 2010 from Barclays Capital where he managed a model development team within Credit Risk Analytics. Prior to joining Barclays Capital in 2004, he was a senior quantitative analyst at Dresdner Bank in Frankfurt.

Alexei holds MSc in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from the University of Kiev and PhD in Mathematical Physics from the Institute for Mathematics, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

He was the recipient of the 2019 Quant of the Year award from Risk magazine.

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Alex Lipton

Global head of quantitative R&D

ADIA

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

Managing director, head of quantitative analytics and quantitative development

NatWest Markets

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.

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Gordon Ritter

Founder & CIO

Ritter Alpha

Gordon Ritter is a Professor at NYU Courant and Tandon, Baruch College, and Rutgers, and an elite buy-side quantitative trader / portfolio manager (selected as Buy-Side Quant of the Year, 2019). His scholarly research papers have 10,000+ downloads; he is an expert in statistical machine learning and its applications in finance. Most recently Gordon founded his own quantitative trading firm; before that he was a senior portfolio manager at GSA Capital where he designed, built, and managed statistical arbitrage strategies in multiple geographies and asset classes, and directed research in GSA's New York office. (GSA won the Equity Market Neutral & Quantitative Strategies category at the Eurohedge awards four times, with numerous other awards.) Prior to GSA, Gordon was a Vice President of Highbridge Capital and a core member of the firm's statistical arbitrage group. Gordon is frequently an invited speaker and typically speaks at 20+ conferences per year. Prior to entering the hedge fund industry in 2007, Gordon completed his PhD in mathematical physics at Harvard University, where he worked with Arthur Jaffe and published papers in international journals across the fields of quantum computation, quantum field theory, and abstract algebra. He earned his Bachelor's degree with honours in Mathematics from the University of Chicago.

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Mathieu Rosenbaum

Professor of finance

Ecole Polytechnique

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.

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Dario Villani

Chief executive officer

Duality Group

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.

Gordon Lee

Head of Markets Quants

BNY Mellon

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Igor Halperin

Quant

Fidelity Investments

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