Michèle Patricia Akiobe Songolo is currently Professor of Economic and Financial Crime at Laval University School of Social Work and Criminology. Her research interests include financial regulation and supervision, the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing, and financial fraud and investigations. She previously worked as an analyst in financial institution standardization at the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), where she drafted guidelines, instructions, notices and other administrative documents aimed at ensuring a better prudential framework for financial institutions. Her research interests have also led her to acquire knowledge in the fields of derivatives, financial and technological innovation, and ethics and governance. She has written on the digitization of securitization, open banking and blockchain technology. Professor Akiobe Songolo holds a doctorate in banking and financial law from Université Laval. Her thesis, which focused on the subprime crisis and, more specifically, on the management of financial risks linked to the securitization of bank receivables, enabled her to develop a sound knowledge of the management of risks that can affect the smooth operation of financial markets.
David Ardia is IVADO Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at HEC Montréal. Trained in quantitative methods for finance, he is interested in asset allocation, risk management and textual analysis. In 2018, the Swiss Risk Association awarded him the title of “Swiss Risk Manager of the Year”. He is a regular member at GERAD, Quantact and Fin-ML, a research associate at OBVIA, and an instructor at DataCamp.
Régis Barondeau is Associate Professor in the Department of Analytics, Operations and Information Technology at UQAM School of Mangement. He is interested in the evolution and effects of technologies on individuals and organizations. His current research focuses on blockchain technologies in organizations and NFTs. His research interests include blockchain technologies, monitoring emerging technologies, particularly online privacy and security issues, wiki collaboration and, more generally, the adoption and impact of technologies on organizations.
Julie Biron is Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Law and Director of the Observatoire du droit des marchés financiers. She also sits on several boards of directors. In recent years, she has participated in the development and supervision of major projects on investor rights, market intermediary liability, governance, compliance, business law and the regulatory framework applicable to financial products and services. Over the years, Professor Biron has published several texts on topics relating to share ownership, corporate governance and financial markets. Professor Biron has received numerous awards for her academic excellence in civil and commercial law, including the Prix d’excellence en enseignement from the Université de Montréal in 2017, the Prix de la Fondation du Barreau in 2018 for the Code civil du Québec – Annotations, Commentaires, and the Prix d’excellence professorale André-Morel in 2020.
Keven Bluteau is Assistant Professor in the Finance Department at the University of Sherbrooke. He holds a joint PhD in Finance and Business Economics from the University of Neuchâtel and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. His current research focuses on the automatic extraction of signals from textual and media data for the valuation of financial assets. His research interests include climate finance, financial risk management and the use of artificial intelligence and textual analysis tools in an economic and financial framework. He is a member of GREFA. He is also an active member of the R community, maintaining/collaborating on four statistical libraries actively used in research and industry.
Serge Darolles is Professor of Finance at Université Paris Dauphine – PSL, where he heads the Master in Finance and teaches financial econometrics and empirical finance. Before joining Dauphine, he worked for Lyxor Asset Management between 2000 and 2012, where he developed mathematical models for various investment strategies. He has also held consulting positions at Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, Banque Paribas and Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique. Serge specializes in financial econometrics and has written numerous articles published in leading academic journals. He is also a member of the AMF Scientific Advisory Board. Serge holds a PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Toulouse and a diploma from ENSAE, Paris.
Elie Elia is a professor in the Department of Analytics, Operations and Information Technology at UQAM, School of Management specializing in information systems. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal. Prior to his academic career, Professor Elia held positions as analyst and technology project manager at a major Canadian financial institution. His preferred field is business intelligence (AI). He leads the “Business Data Analytics” axis within the Information Technology (IT) programs, and teaches courses at the graduate level. To date, he has supervised more than 50 research projects and graduate internships. As a member of transfer units, Professor Elia works closely with organizations from various economic sectors on partnership research projects in the fields of IT and AI. Since taking up his post in 2004, Professor Elia has been involved in a number of academic bodies at his university (program director mandates, member of his department’s executive committee, member of his faculty’s academic council, etc.). Professor Elia also serves the external community. Notably, he was for several years a member of the Board of Directors of a not-for-profit organization in the cultural sector, and chaired the “BTM Forum”, a pan-Canadian initiative bringing together representatives from academia and industry interested in the subject of IT talent development.
Dena Firoozi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at HEC Montréal. She is currently Academic Director of the M.Sc. program in Financial Engineering at HEC Montréal, which is offered in English and French. Prior to joining HEC Montréal, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Toronto, between 2018-2020, where she worked with Sebastian Jaimungal in the Mathematical Finance program. She was also an exchange PhD student in the same program during fall 2017. Firoozi earned her PhD in Electrical Engineering under the supervision of Peter E. Caines in the Systems and Control program at McGill University in 2019. She received her M.Sc. from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 2011, and her B.Sc. from Shiraz University, Iran, in 2009, both in Electrical Engineering – Systems and Control. Her research interests include stochastic control and mean-field games, and their applications in finance. In particular, she is interested in modeling energy and financial markets as large population dynamic games, and in solving problems such as optimal trading, systemic risk, equilibrium pricing, market manipulation and contract design.
Alfred Lehar is Professor of Finance at the Haskayne Business School, University of Calgary. He has been teaching at the Haskayne School of Business since 2005. He received an undergraduate degree and a PhD from the University of Vienna. Prior to Joining Haskayne, he held positions at the University of Vienna and the University of British Columbia. His areas of research interest include fintech, bank regulation, financial stability, and corporate finance. Professor Lehar is currently researching mining fees and price differentials in Bitcoin markets, decentralized exchanges, and under what conditions renegotiations can facilitate a private sector workout of a financial crisis. He also works on how information produced by financial markets can be optimally used in bank regulation. In his previous research, Professor Lehar developed several methods on how to measure the probability of a financial crisis, analyzed conflicts of interest for financial Analysts, and looked at the empirical fit of alternative option pricing models. His work has been published in the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, the Journal of Financial Intermediation, the Journal of Banking and Finance, and the Review of Finance.
Manuel Morales is a professor at the Université de Montréal working in the field of machine learning applied to the banking and investment industry. An active member of the Montreal AI community, he is involved in various collaborative initiatives that connect technical data science teams with product owners and managers, to leverage research to achieve business value creation goals. During his tenure as Chief AI Scientist at National Bank of Canada, Canada’s sixth largest commercial bank, he oversaw the scientific component of the institution-wide AI transformation initiative, including capital market applications. He is currently leading a collaborative project with TMX Montreal focused on detecting potentially delinquent activity in automated trading activities as well as insider trading. These projects exploit limit order book data and news feeds to flag suspicious sequences. As an OBVIA affiliated researcher, he is also involved in the ongoing global discussion on AI ethics and commitment to responsible AI deployments. He is currently working on the impact of AI in ESG footprint measurement and reporting in the context of sustainable finance. He continues to conduct collaborative research and teaching activities at the Université de Montréal, where he is director of the FinML network, whose mandate is to train the next generation of AI-enabled finance and banking professionals. He is also Associate Director of Partnerships at the Centre de recherche mathématique (CRM) de Montréal, where he strives to build bridges between industry and the mathematical community in the province of Quebec. He is an active member of the FinTech community in Montreal, where he plays various roles as advisor and founder.
Emilio Said is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the Université de Montréal. He holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Université Paris-Saclay and CentraleSupélec, as well as four M.Sc. degrees in mathematics, physics, computer science and financial engineering from Sorbonne Université, Université Grenoble Alpes and École nationale supérieure de mathématiques appliquées et d’informatique de Grenoble. Before joining the Université de Montréal, he also worked as a researcher and quantitative trader at several financial institutions in Paris. His research interests include financial market microstructure, algorithmic trading, options markets and statistical learning methods and their applications in finance.
Xiaozhou Zhou is Associate Professor in the Finance Department of UQAM School of Management. He holds a Ph.D. in Finance from HEC Montréal and an M.Sc. in Economics from Université de Montréal. His research interests include financial market microstructure, high-frequency data and risk management. He is a member of the Canada Research Chair in Risk Management and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec Chair in Portfolio Management. The professor has received grants from FRQSC and FinTech Montréal.