Previous Speakers

Ben Fahimnia is a Professor and Chair at the University of Sydney, and also serves as Director for the Supply Chain & Logistics Association of Australia (SCLAA). Since receiving his PhD in 2011, he has held various academic positions and leadership roles prior to his promotion to a Professor in 2016, distinguishing him as the youngest Australian Full Professor. He has a multidisciplinary background with degrees and experience in business, engineering, psychology, and dramatic arts. As an expert in applied and problem-driven research, Prof Fahimnia leads multidisciplinary teams tasked to develop decision-making approaches to help individuals and organizations make systematic and informed decisions. He is frequently consulted by a range of businesses from small and medium size companies to Fortune 500 corporations. His research has attracted substantial funding of over $120m from governments, industries, and universities. He is an award-winning speaker at various conferences and industry events, and his articles have been published in premier journals and conference proceedings.

Title of Speech: Building Resilience in Essential Supply Chains: The Cornerstone of a Robust Global Economy

David Rapson is a Chancellor's Leadership Professor in the Economics Department at UC Davis, Director of the Davis Energy Economics Program, and Policy Advisor & Senior Research Economist at the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. The central objective of Professor Rapson's work is to understand and demonstrate how consumers and firms respond to incentives, and what this implies for effective energy, environmental and economic policy.

His work examines a central tension of the energy transition. On one hand, government intervention can improve outcomes when markets fail and when government policies set correct incentives; on the other hand, poorly conceived government interventions may create incentives that undermine goals that they are trying to achieve. Professor Rapson's research seeks to understand the difference to discern which policies will be effective.

At the moment, Professor Rapson's research primarily focuses on the transportation sector, where decarbonization is challenging due to the centrality of fossil fuels as the main energy input. He is an expert on electric vehicles, energy markets, climate policy and regulation. His research appears in the American Economic Review, Science, Nature, and other academic journals. Dr. Rapson has held various posts in service to the profession and the community. He is currently Treasurer of the US Association of Energy Economists and is on the Editorial Council of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics. From 2015-2019 he was Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. He earned degrees from Dartmouth College (AB), Queen's University (MA) and Boston University (PhD).

Dr Anh Tran is a Professor of Finance at Bayes Business School (formerly Cass Business School) of City, University of London in August 2010. He is the Academic Director of the M&A Research Centre, the Director of the Business School's summer programme, a fellow of the Gupta Governance Institute, and a fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. He is also a founding member, trustee and vice president of the Vietnam Finance Association International. Professor Tran's research interests are in empirical corporate finance, including mergers and acquisitions, institutional investors, executive compensation, and corporate governance. He has published many research articles in world leading journals including Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Management Science. His research papers have been presented at more than 40 international conferences and 60 university seminars around the world. He has been a co-chair of the annual academic conference in M&A at the Business School and acting as a journal editorial board member and a reviewer for many journals and conferences in the field.

Link to profile on the university website:
https://www.bayes.city.ac.uk/faculties-and-research/experts/anh-tran

Tim Forsyth works at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the political and governance implications of global environmental policy within developing countries. His expertise includes political institutions, local politics, and the governance of scientific and local knowledge. He has worked mainly in South and Southeast Asia, with reference to forest policy, livelihoods, and connections to climate change policy. He has been a specialist adviser to the United Kingdom Parliamentary International Development Committee on two occasions, and has been a lead for the recent scoping exercise for transformative change for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Previously he was a research fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), London. He is a co-editor of five journals and was the lead editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of International Development.

Title of Speech: New challenges for multi-level, multi-actor governance in global environmental policy: what lessons for institutional theory?

Professor Subrahmanyam ("Subra") is currently a Distinguished Professor of Finance and the Goldyne and Irwin Hearsh Chair in Money and Banking at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. in finance from the Anderson School in 1990. He was Assistant Professor at Columbia University from 1990 to 1993, and Visiting Associate Professor at Anderson in 1993-1994. His current research interests range from the relationship between the trading environment of a firm's stock and the firm's cost of capital to behavioral theories for asset price behavior to empirical determinants of the cross-section of equity returns. Professor Subrahmanyam is the author or coauthor of more than a hundred refereed journal articles on these and other subjects in leading finance and economics journals. He is a member of the Working Research Group on Market Microstructure recently established by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Cambridge, Mass.

Title of Speech: Momentum, Reversals, and Investor Clientele

Prof Thomas Reuter is a Professorial Fellow at the Asia Institute of the University of Melbourne (UoM) in Australia, but currently living in Germany and affiliated with the Southeast Asia Institute, University of Bonn. After obtaining his PhD from ANU in Australia in 1997, he taught at Heidelberg University in his native Germany, before taking up post-doctoral and QElI Fellowships at UoM, a Monash Research Fellowship at Monash University and an ARC Future Fellowship and professorship back at UoM. He was President of the Australian Anthropological Association (2002-2005) chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations (2008-2012), Senior Vice-President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (2008-2018), a member of the executive of the International Social Science Council (2013-2018) and an expert advisor to IPBES and IPCC. He is a member of the board of Future Earth (Asia) and the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS), and a fellow of the European Academy of Science (EASA) and Academia Europaea (EA). Research in Indonesia and beyond has focused on indigenous people, social movements, religion, political elites, ecology, climate change, food security and globalisation. Prof Reuter has published fifteen books and over 150 articles.

Title of Speech: Sustainable Development means Managing the Future': An anthropological perspective on the central challenge of the 21st century

Lauren Cohen is the L.E. Simmons Professor in the Finance & Entrepreneurial Management Units at Harvard Business School and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is an Editor of the Review of Financial Studies, along with being a past Editor of Management Science, and serving on the editorial board of the Review of Asset Pricing Studies. He teaches in the MBA Program, Executive Education Program, Doctoral Program, and Special Custom Programs at the Harvard Business School.

Title of Speech: The ESG-Innovation Disconnect: New Insights into the Future of Green Innovation

Bige Kahraman Alper holds a PhD in Economics from Yale University with specialisations in financial economics and econometrics. Her research focuses on analysing the sources of market frictions giving rise to market inefficiency and systematic liquidity crises. Her recent studies quantify the importance of various frictions - for instance, arising from capital constraints, organisational structures in asset management intermediaries and asymmetric information - and examine the role of financial innovation that can help markets overcome these frictions. Her papers appear in top academic journals such as Journal of Finance and Review of Financial Studies.

Title of Speech: ES Risks and Shareholder Voice

Amir Amel-Zadeh's research examines the effects of companies' financial and non-financial information disclosures on capital markets and the mediating role of accounting standards and information intermediaries. Amir's research has been published in leading academic and practitioner journals such as The Accounting Review, Review of Accounting Studies, and Financial Analyst Journal. His work has been cited by the business press such as the Financial Times and the Guardian as well as in a variety of policy documents by the EU, Bank of International Settlements, IMF, World Economic Forum and by accounting standard setters. He currently serves as Associate Editor for the Special Issue on Business and Climate Change at Management Science and is on the Editorial Board of Accounting and Business Research. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Title of Speech: Sustainability and capital markets: Do investors care about ESG?

DAVID ZILBERMAN is a Professor, Extension specialist and holder of the Robinson Chair in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California at Berkeley. His areas of expertise include agricultural and environmental economics and policy, water, marketing, risk management, the economics of innovation, natural resources, biotechnology, and biofuels. He is the recipient of the 2019 Wolf Prize in Agriculture, and the 2018-19 President of Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA). He is an elected member of the USA National academy of Science, a Fellow of the AAEA, the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and Honorary Life Member of the International Association of Agricultural Economists. Among his awards is the 2005 and 2010 AAEA Publication of Enduring Quality Award and the UNESCO International Cannes Prize for Water and the Economy (2000). He has published more than 350 refereed articles in journals ranging from Science to ARE-Update and has edited 20 books. He has served as a Consultant to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the World Bank and FAO. He is the founding Academic Director of the Masters Development Practice program at UC Berkeley, and the founding co-director of the Bearhs ELP. He is also one of the Founders of the International Consortium of Applied Bio-economy Research (ICABR). David served as the chair of his department, director of the Giannini Foundation, and is a coeditor of ARE-Update and the Annual Review of Resource Economics. David contributes regularly to The Berkeley Blog.

Title of Speech: Designing Supply Chains to Implements Innovations

Serving in the Stanford position since 1988, he was a co-developer of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program with Prof. Tom Byers and the founding professor of Technology Venture Formation. He also co-teaches with Prof. Ray Levitt, Entrepreneurship in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Both courses are some of the highest rated courses in the School of Engineering. He is the co-creator of the Stanford Innovation and Entrepreneurship two-week program for existing high-tech companies produced and managed by the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD).

Title of Speech: DER Applications of Advanced Energy Storage Technology in Micro Grid Deployments

Michela Giorcelli is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UCLA. She is an economic historian, with interests in labor economics and the economics of innovation. Her research primarily focuses on the determinants of productivity and innovation in the 20th century.

Title of Speech: The Importance of Management Practices on Firm Performance Today and Historically