Master of Financial Engineering Program
Meet Haas Faculty
The cornerstone of the entire Berkeley MFE program is its distinguished faculty and the high quality of their courses. At Haas, effective teaching is the top priority. MFE faculty members have regularly earned a median score of "Club 6" in their student evaluations-that is, their median ratings are 6 or higher on a 7-point scale.
Thought Leaders, Innovators, and Practitioners
In the Berkeley MFE classroom, faculty members emphasize both theory and practice by using a variety of teaching methods. Case studies, seminars, simulations, guest speakers, and group projects all facilitate the learning process. Classroom learning is enhanced by numerous opportunities to apply the lessons to real-world situations.
Professors regularly integrate their research findings into new course offerings and reassess the MFE curriculum to ensure its relevance in presenting current issues. In their courses, students benefit by being among the first to learn of faculty discoveries and by studying directly with the inventors of yesterday's and tomorrow's innovative theories and principles.
Passionate Scholars and Teachers
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Mukesh Bajaj Managing Director of Finance and Damages Practice and Board of Directors, LECG, LLC. Ph.D. (finance), University of California, Berkeley. Corporate finance and financial strategy, dividend policy, capital and ownership structure, determinants of stock returns, design and pricing of securities. |
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Jeffrey Bohn Managing Director, Financial Strategies Division, Shinsei Bank. Ph.D. (finance), University of California, Berkeley. Risky debt valuation, credit derivatives, banking, risk management, and global portfolio management. |
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Gregory Duffee Assistant Professor. Ph.D. (economics), Harvard University. Pricing and trading credit risk (theoretical and empirical), termstructure modeling, risk management of financial institutions.Formerly a member of the Trading Risk Analysis group at the Federal Reserve Board. |
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Mark Garman Professor Emeritus. Ph.D. (systems and communications sciences), Carnegie Mellon University. Arbitrage, options, volatility measures, duration-related risk measures. President and Chief Scientist of Financial Engineering Associates, Inc., a provider of software for derivatives and value-at-risk analysis. |
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Dwight M. Jaffee Willis H. Booth Professor of Banking & Finance. Ph.D. (economics), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Loan activities of financial institutions, commercial loan and mortgage markets, credit rationing, asset-backed security markets, catastrophe insurance financing. Board of Directors Barr Rosenberg Mutual Funds; Visiting Scholar, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. |
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Ronald N. Kahn Managing Director and Global Head of Equity Research, Barclays Global Investors. Ph.D. (physics), Harvard University. Portfolio management, risk modeling, and quantitative analysis. Author (with Richard Grinold), Active Portfolio Management: Quantitative Theory and Applications. |
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Gregory LaBlanc Lecturer in Finance, Strategy, and Law. B.A. (history; politics, philosophy, and economics), University of Pennsylvania. BS (economics), Wharton School. JD (corporate and securities law) George Mason University, LLM program, UC Berkeley. |
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Hayne Leland Arno A. Rayner Professor of Finance and Management. Ph.D. (mathematical economics), Harvard University. Dynamic investment strategies and portfolio insurance, informational asymmetries, structure, and intermediation in financial markets, regulation of insider trading, risky debt valuation. Director and founding principal of the investment firm Leland O'Brien Rubinstein Associates Inc. Past president of the American Finance Association. |
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Richard K. Lyons Bank of America Dean and Professor. Ph.D. (economics), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Foreign exchange markets: volatility, volume, high frequency dynamics, and dealer behavior; micro-institutional approach to foreign exchange; transparency in dealership markets. Trustee for Matthews International Funds. |
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John Martinez Former Director of iShares, Inc., and trustee of iShares Trust, managed by Barclays Global Investors. AB (economics), University of California, Berkeley. MBA (finance and statistics), University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Former Chairman of the Independent Review Committee for the Canadian iShares funds managed by Barclays Global Investors, Canada. Former Director for REX & Co., Inc., a real estate equity finance solutions company. Director of Larkin Street Youth Services. Former senior executive and board of directors member with Barclays Global Investors Services. Former CEO of the Global Index and Markets Group. |
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Michael Melvin Managing Director and Head of Currency Research, Barclays Global Investors. Ph.D., UCLA. International finance and exchange rate modeling. Co-Editor Journal of International Money & Finance. |
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John O'Brien Adjunct Professor. MS. (operations research), University of California, Los Angeles. Faculty Director, Master of Financial Engineering Program. Managing Director at Credit Suisse Asset Management (CSAM). Cofounder, chairman, and CEO of the investment firm Leland O'Brien Rubinstein. Cofounder and original chairman & CEO of Wilshire Associates (originally named O'Brien Associates). |
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Terrance Odean Willis H. Booth Chair in Banking and Finance. Ph.D. (finance), University of California, Berkeley. Behavioral finance. |
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Eric Reiner Managing Director , Group Risk Control, UBS AG, New York and Zurich Development of firm-wide risk aggregation (including Economic Capital) models. Prior to assuming this role in February 2003, he was a Managing Director in Equities Trading for 5 years, most recently as global head of a 120-strong team spanning IT and trading functions and responsible for all aspects of equities front-office derivatives and risk systems and modelling, and previously as founding head of Equities Quantitative Strategies, responsible for all valuation and risk management models for equities products globally. |
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Mark Rubinstein Paul Stephens Professor of Applied Investment Analysis. Ph.D. (finance), University of California, Los Angeles. Options markets, dynamic investment strategies, option pricing theory, exotic options, implied binomial trees, portfolio management software. Winner of nine prizes for papers in financial economics; 1995 Financial Engineer of the Year. Coauthor of Options Markets and author of the innovative and comprehensive text, Derivatives: A PowerPlus Picture Book. Founding principal of the investment management firm Leland O'Brien Rubinstein Associates. Past president of the American Finance Association. Advisor on derivatives to the SEC, the CBOE and other exchanges, and numerous financial firms. |
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Jeff (Yuqing) Shen Jeff and his team manage BGI’s long only, partial long short and hedge fund strategies invested in Asia and Emerging Markets. Before BGI, Jeff was the global head of macro absolute return product and asset allocation strategy at JP Morgan Fleming Asset Management in New York. |
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Richard Stanton Associate Professor. Ph.D. (finance), Stanford University. Mortgage markets-prepayment modeling, valuation and hedging, term structure modeling and valuation of derivative securities, application of nonparametric estimation techniques to the hedging and pricing of derivatives. |
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Domingo Tavella Principal of Octanti Associates, Inc. Ph.D. (engineering), Stanford University. Computational methods in financial pricing, stochastic simulation in finance and insurance, financial software development strategies and methods, risk management strategies in finance and insurance, hybrid insurance structures. |
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Alexei Tchistyi Assistant Professor of Finance and Real Estate. Ph.D. (business), Stanford. M.S. (applied mathematics and physics), Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Financial innovations, mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, moral hazard, contact theory. |
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Suneel Udpa Lecturer. Ph.D. (accounting), Washington University St. Louis. Evaluating ASPs and reducing costs through outsourcing. |
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Rossen Valkanov Assistant Professor. Ph.D. (economics), Princeton University. Empirical asset pricing, econometrics, macroeconomics, term structure modeling, properties of long-horizon returns. |
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Nancy E. Wallace Professor and Real Estate Group Chair. Ph.D. (urban and regional planning), University of Michigan. Mortgage contract design, mortgage prepayment and valuation models, asset-backed securitization and pricing, real estate price dynamics, real options in real estate. |
