Research Track Leads
Lemma Senbet, Corporate Governance Track Lead
Director, Center for Financial Policy
William E. Mayer Chair Professor of Finance
Lemma Senbet is the William E. Mayer Chair Professor of Finance and was chair of
the Smith School’s 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 an 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), and served as executive editor of Financial Management (6 years).
He is currently finance area editor for Journal of International Business Studies. Senbet has produced a string of doctoral students and placed them in major universities.
Haluk Ünal, Financial Institutions/Consumer Finance Track Lead
Professor
Haluk Ünal is a Professor of Finance, at the Robert H. Smith School of Business,
University of Maryland, Special Advisor to the Center for Financial Research of
the FDIC, and Senior Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center. He is
also the Managing Editor of the Journal of Financial Services Research.
Ünal holds doctorates in finance from Ohio State and in economics from
Istanbul University, where he did his undergraduate work as well. He also earned a
MS degree in accounting from Ohio State. He previously taught at the Ohio State
University and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches
corporate finance, management of financial institutions, and fixed income securities
courses.
His current research focuses on executive compensation, corporate bonds, bank
mergers, pricing default risk, risk management, and mutual-to-stock conversions
in the savings and loan industry. He is published in the Journal of Finance,
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Financial Services
Research, Journal of Money Credit and Banking, Journal of Banking and Finance,
Review of Derivatives Research, and Journal of Financial Economics and
Review of Financial Studies.
Ünal has been a consultant to the World Bank, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation,
and the Department of Justice. He is also on the academic council of Standard and
Poor’s. Internationally, he delivered invited lectures in Portugal, China, Italy,
Mexico, Peru, Poland, Switzerland, and Turkey. He also held executive training for
Fannie Mae, Hughes Network Systems, Oracle, SAIC, and Wharton’s Executive Masters
in Technology Management program.
Alex Triantis, Risk Management Track Lead
Finance Professor
Alex Triantis is a professor of finance and the chairman of the finance department
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.
Albert “Pete” Kyle, Asset Management and Market Design Track Lead
Charles E. Smith Chair Professor of Finance
Albert S. (Pete) Kyle has been the Charles E. Smith Chair Professor
of Finance at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business since
2006. He earned is B.S. degree in mathematics from Davidson College (summa cum laude,
1974), studied philosophy and economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar
from Texas (1974-1977), and completed his Ph.D. in economics at the University of
Chicago in 1981. He has been a professor at Princeton University (1981-1987), the
University of California Berkeley (1987-1992), and Duke University (1992-2006).
Kyle’s research focuses on market microstructure, including topics
such as informed speculative trading, market manipulation, price volatility, the
information content of market prices, market liquidity, and contagion. His current
research also deals with concepts from industrial organization to value companies.
His teaching interests include market microstructure, institutional asset management,
venture capital and private equity, corporate finance, option pricing, and asset
pricing.
He has been a Fellow of the Econometric Society (2002), a board member of the
American Finance Association (2004-2006), a staff member of the Presidential Task
Force on Market Mechanisms (Brady Commission, 1987), a member of NASDAQ’s economic
advisory board (2004-2007), a member of the FINRA economic advisory committee (since
2010), and a member of the CFTC’s Technology Advisory Committee (since 2010).
Vojislav (Max) Maksimovic, Emerging Markets Track Lead
Dean's Chair Professor of Finance and Department Chair
Vojislav "Max" Maksimovic is the Dean's Chair Professor of Finance at the Smith School.
His recent research focuses on how a firm's organizational structure affects the
flow of resources across its divisions. He has also worked on how competition in
high technology industries determines the timing of initial public offerings. He
is interested in international finance, specifically in how a country's legal and
institutional environment influences the financing and investment by firms.
Maksimovic's
research has been published in the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial
Studies, Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Financial Economics, and
Journal of Banking and Finance. He is an associate editor of Financial Management and a member of the
board of directors of the Western Finance Association.
