Center Leadership
LEADERS IN BUSINESS & ACADEMIA
Lemma W. Senbet, Director
William E. Mayer Chair Professor of Finance
Senbet is responsible for providing the Center’s
vision, strategy, and oversight.
Professor
Senbet was Chair of the Finance Department, 1998-2006, and his tenure
saw rapid transformation of the department into world class. His widely
cited publications have appeared in the Journal of Finance,
Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Business, and other
leading academic journals. He has received numerous honors and
professional recognitions. He has been a director of the American
Finance Association and served as President of the Western Finance
Association. He is inducted Fellow of the Financial Management
Association International and a member of the Financial Economists
Roundtable. He was awarded an honorary doctor of letters Honoris Causa
by Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia's flagship institution of higher
learning. Senbet has advised the World Bank, the IMF, the UN, and other
institutions on issues of financial sector reforms and capital market
development. He has served as an independent director for The Fortis
Funds and currently is an independent director for The Hartford Funds.
Senbet has also served on over a dozen editorial boards, including the
Journal of Finance (12 years), Financial Management (20
years), Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (7
years), served as executive editor of Financial Management (6
years), and Editor (Finance), JIBS (5 years). Senbet has produced a
string of doctoral students and placed them in major universities,
including Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, Florida, and
Minnesota. He received the Smith School's Krowe Award for Teaching
Excellence in 1994.
Michelle Lui, Assistant
Director
Lui coordinates the Center’s operations, marketing, and
communications.
Prior
to joining the CFP, Michelle served as Director of Enrollment Management
Operations at Franklin & Marshall College. In this role, she was responsible for
managing the daily operations of the college's Enrollment Management division,
overseeing communication flow, organizing special events, providing relevant
data analyses to internal and external groups, monitoring the capital and
operating budgets, managing the technological processes utilized in the
organization, and interfacing with the Board of Trustees. She regularly
collaborated with other college divisions including Advancement, Communications,
Institutional Research, Finance, and Technology Services.
Michelle has also had previous experience in product management at Tyco
Electronics. There, she collaborated with Marketing and Communications managers
to revise and create catalogs, datasheets, and web content. Moreover, she
oversaw the transfer of data to a global data system and provided liaison
support between technical engineers and global account managers.
William Longbrake, Executive-in-Residence
Longbrake serves as senior policy advisor to the
center.
Dr. Longbrake has extensive experience in finance, macroeconomics and
monetary policy, risk management, housing, public policy and academia,
government, serving both the public and private sectors. As an
executive-in-residence at the Smith School, Longbrake works on a variety
of business, policy, and governance issues with faculty, students,
business leaders, government policymakers, and executives of
not-for-profit organizations. He also serves on the boards of directors
of First Financial Northwest, a community bank located in Renton,
Washington; the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle; and the Washington
Financial League. Longbrake is a member of several committees of the
American Bankers Association, including those for government relations,
governance and mortgage markets. He serves on the boards of trustees of
Auburn Theological Seminary; the College of Wooster; and is president of
the Intiman Theatre Foundation. He is president and chairman of the
board of trustees of Lift Up Africa, a charitable organization that
finances humanitarian and economic development initiatives on the
continent of Africa, and is president and chairman of the board of
trustees of the Longbrake Family Foundation. In the academic sector,
Longbrake has published extensively and has taught courses in business
administration and finance. In 2007, he received the Distinguished
Alumnus of the Year award from the Smith School. Longbrake is active in
numerous academic, business, and community service organizations,
particularly those involving issues surrounding affordable housing and
education. He chairs the Washington State Citizens Commission for Review
of Tax Preferences. He is a member of the Governor’s Council of Economic
Advisors for Washington State, a member of the University of Washington
Business School Advisory Board and a member of the Smith School’s Board
of Visitors. He is chairman emeritus of the Financial Services
Roundtable’s Housing Policy Council and former vice chair of Washington
Mutual, Inc.
Steve Wallenstein
Director, Directors’ Institute
Professor of the Practice
Wallenstein heads the newly established Directors’ Institute, which
is linked with the Center for Financial Policy.
Steve
Wallenstein is a Professor of the Practice at the Robert H. Smith School
of Business and he is also director of the Directors' Institute at the
Smith School, an ongoing series to address the corporate governance
failures of diligence, ethics and controls in corporate America.
Wallenstein is a recognized expert in corporate governance and best
practices for publicly traded companies in the US and abroad. From 1998
to 2009 he was a faculty member at the Fuqua School of Business and Duke
Law School, founded the Duke Directors' Education Institute (DEI) in
2002, and established the Duke Global Capital Markets Center (GCMC) in
1998, a collaborative venture between Fuqua and Duke Law. Wallenstein is
also an expert on emerging markets, having spent fifteen years as Senior
Counsel and Senior Investment Officer at the International Finance
Corporation in Washington D.C. He was responsible for structuring and
negotiating international project finance, privatizations and capital
markets transactions in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia.
Wallenstein, who speaks fluent Portuguese, maintains close ties with
Brazil where he taught law and development at the Catholic University in
Rio de Janeiro, as well as a course on the Global Financial Crisis at
Fundacao Getulio Vargas. He was a member of the Board of Directors of
CVRD – INCO (Canada) and a member of the Audit Committee from 2006-2007,
and a corporate governance advisor to the Management Committee of
Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (VALE) from 2007-2009. Wallenstein has taught
several interdisciplinary courses on corporate governance, venture
capital and private equity, and international finance.
Alexander J. Triantis
Finance Professor
Senior Academic Advisor
Dr. Triantis is a professor of finance at the Robert H. Smith School of Business. Prior to
coming to Smith, he was a faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of
Management (as a visiting scholar) and the University of Wisconsin. He
has published numerous articles related to corporate finance and
valuation in leading academic journals including Journal of
Accounting and Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of International
Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, Management Science, and
the Review of Financial Studies, and in practitioner journals
such as RISK, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance and
Mergers and Acquisitions. He is currently on the Editorial Advisory
Board of the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, a senior
editor of Production and Operations Management. He has also
served as editor of Financial Management and associate editor
of Management Science. Triantis has consulted and provided
executive training in the areas of real options analysis, risk
management, derivatives pricing, capital budgeting, and project finance
to multinational corporations and organizations such as Airbus Industry,
BHP Billiton, DuPont, Ernst & Young, Hyatt, Jefferies and Company,
Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, Northrop Grumman,
PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. Dept. of Energy, and the World Bank. His
research has been featured in BusinessWeek, CFO magazine, Financial
Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and numerous other
periodicals. He frequently lectures on topics related to real options
analysis at domestic and international conferences and executive forums.
He has received awards and citations for teaching excellence and was
named by BusinessWeek as an Outstanding Professor at the
University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland.
