5th Annual News & Finance Conference

Scott Ross Baker is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Kellogg School of Management. His research is concentrated in empirical finance and macroeconomics. He is currently engaged in a variety of research projects regarding household financial choices and the measurement of consumption, as well as research regarding the effects of policy uncertainty on financial markets and growth.

Dr. Tucker Balch is a managing director at J.P. Morgan AI Research. The AI Research group conducts research in areas of core relevance to financial services, including electronic markets, complex systems modeling, cryptography, machine learning, and explainability. J.P. Morgan AI Research partners with teams across the firm as well as with leading academic institutions globally.

Azi Ben-Rephael is an Associate Professor of Finance at Rutgers University. Ben-Rephael earned his Ph.D. in Finance from Tel Aviv University. Before joining Rutgers, he was an assistant professor at Indiana University. Ben-Rephael’s research interests are mainly in empirical and behavioral asset pricing, with a special focus on investor sentiment and investor attention.

Joey Engelberg is a Professor of Finance and Accounting at the University of California, San Diego.

Engelberg's research focuses on the way information is disseminated among market participants, especially by financial media and social networks.

Stephen Thomas is Head of Data Mining at the Financial Times.

Matthias is the head of Analytics & Quantitative Modelling (AQM) in Investment Solutions at UBS Asset Management, the global lead for sentiment analytics at UBS Group, and a lecturer at the University of Zurich teaching sentiment analytics and portfolio management. Previously, he was Chief Investment Officer at FLYNT Bank AG, and has worked in various roles in the CIO Office at UBS Wealth Management, at UBS Investment Bank, at Deutsche Bank, and at the KOF Swiss Economic Institute of the ETH Zurich.

Mary Williams Walsh joined The New York Times as a business and financial writer in 2000. Previously, she was a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal. Her first foreign posting, for the Journal, was to Mexico in the 1980s, during a vast debt crisis that spread all the way from the Rio Grande to the southern reaches of Argentina. That experience gave her a lasting interest in debt, sustainability issues, and ways of dealing with major insolvencies.

Russ Wermers is Bank of America Professor of Finance and Director, Center for Financial Policy at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland at College Park, where he won a campus-wide teaching award during 2005 and a Krowe Teaching Award (within the Smith Business School) during 2013. His main research interests include studies of the efficiency of securities markets, as well as the role of institutional investors in setting stock prices.