Joseph Egbulefu, Ph.D.
Joseph Egbulefu is the founder and chief executive at Meritic, a seed-stage startup that is building intelligence for online communities and markets. The firm leverages community discourse, blockchain transactions, and market data to discover pricing and competitor intelligence. Currently, the firm is working with several non-fungible token (NFT) vendors to build price discovery analytics for NFT assets.
Egbulefu has over 10 years of professional quantitative modeling and software development experience, including several years as a credit risk quant. Before founding Meritic, he was with Barclays Investment Bank for over two years where he implemented exposure at default (EAD) models for institutional credit products.
From 2016 to 2018, he was with LearnVest (acquired by Northwestern Mutual) as a research data scientist building Monte Carlo-driven financial wellness measures for retail clients. Egbulefu has also served as an adjunct lecturer in applied analytics at Columbia University for nearly two years.
Egbulefu earned his B.S. in computer science from Cornell in 2004 and Ph.D. in statistics from Rice University in 2013.
Rudy Guerra, Ph.D.
Rudy Guerra is a professor and chair of the Department of Statistics at Rice University. He works in the areas of biomedical, biostatistical and social science research. His biomedical interests include statistical genetics, bioinformatics, and imaging. He is also interested in applications of statistics in the social sciences, especially in education. Guerra is currently serving as the director of the Data Science Minor, a steering committee member of BRIDGE (Building Research on Inequality and Diversity to Grow Equity) and the Doerr Institute. He has a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.S. in applied mathematics from the University of Texas, San Antonio.
Tommy Huie, MBA, CFA
Tommy Huie is currently serving as an advisor to financial services organizations, leveraging his experience in portfolio management and research, wealth management, business strategy, and risk analysis. He has served as president and chief investment officer for several business units, most notably with the U.S. offices of BMO Global Asset Management, and its predecessor, M&I Investment Management Corp. Previously, he has held positions at T. Rowe Price Associates, RJR Investment Management Corp., Richards & Tierney, Inc., TRW Investment Management Co., and U.S. Fiduciary Services, Inc.
Huie graduated from Rice University in 1987 with a B.S. in electrical engineering and a B.A. in mathematical sciences. He also earned an MBA from the Booth Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) holder.
Huie is a Trustee Emeritus of Rice and is a member of both the Board of Advisors for the Jones Graduate School of Business and the Engineering Advisory Board for the George R. Brown School of Engineering. In addition, he has served two terms on the board of the Association of Rice Alumni.
Lada Kyj, Ph.D.
Lada Kyj has been with Vanguard, one of the world’s largest investment management companies, for nearly four years. She is currently the head of Vanguard’s Investment Management Fintech Strategies Group responsible for exploring next-generation investment data science. Prior to this role, she was head of U.S. Equity Index Investment Risk for Vanguard.
From 2014 to 2018 Kyj served as the Head of Trading Strategy and Analytics at Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co LLC (GMO), a privately owned global investment manager that has partnered with a broad range of sophisticated institutions, financial intermediaries, and families to provide the investment expertise.
Prior to her appointment with GMO, Kyj was an Algorithmic Trading Quant at Barclays for nearly four years. She completed several joint-venture econometric projects from 2008-2010 working as a postdoctoral researcher for Deutsche Bank and Humboldt University of Berlin.
Kyj earned her Ph.D. in statistics in 2008 and B.A. in economics and statistics in 2003, all from Rice University.
Max Lee, M.S., CFA
Max Lee is a director at Bank of America Securities, leading the Global Commodity and FX Systematic Strategy and Index Trading team in the development of tactical and systematic hedging strategies on both interday and intraday bases.
After graduating from Rice University with a B.A. in mathematical economic analysis in 2014 and an M.S. in statistics in 2015, he joined Merrill Lynch Commodities at 20 Greenway Plaza where he has focused on low-frequency alpha generation. Since then, he has sought to further develop his academic and professional knowledge. He completed his master’s in information and data science at UC Berkeley in 2018, became a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder, and is a level II candidate for both Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and Certificate in Performance Measurement (CIPM).
Kim Raath, Ph.D.
Kim Raath is founder, board director, and former CEO of Topl. Topl developed a unique blockchain that aims to drive markets and value chains to be more circular and inclusive. Raath grew up in South Africa and comes from an ethical mining and sustainable agricultural background. She is the first Rice University student to simultaneously complete an M.A. in economics and a Ph.D. in statistics. Raath has worked in over 18 developing countries to rebuild and strengthen communities by implementing innovative forms of technology. As a leader in sustainability, Raath is a member of CNBC’s ESG Council and also sits on the advisory board of Xpansiv, a global market for ESG-inclusive commodities. She recently joined Rice University’s Computational Finance and Economic Systems (CoFES) Advisory Board and serves on the Advisory Board of the CEO Foundation.
Michael Reed, Ph.D.
Michael Reed is a senior quantitative researcher and portfolio manager with Zebra Capital Management, a boutique quantitative investment firm that specializes in turning academic research in behavioral finance into investor returns.
From 1994 to 2010 Reed was a founding member and managing director in the Process Driven Trading (PDT) group at Morgan Stanley. PDT was one of the first organizations to specialize in arbitraging market inefficiencies by using big data, statistical modeling, systematic strategies, and fully automated execution. Between 2010 to 2014, Reed managed M J Reed Investment Consulting, which provided consulting and investment advice and capital to individuals, investment funds, and small technology startups.
Reed has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Rice University. He is the chairman and chief investment officer of the Kristin & Michael Reed Family Foundation. Since 2011, he has served as a board member and treasurer of the Jericho Project.
Manolo Sánchez, M.A., MSc
Manolo Sánchez, an adjunct professor of management and operations management at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, is a director at Fannie Mae (FNM) and Stewart Information Systems (STC).
As chairman, president and CEO of BBVA Compass for 10 years, he pioneered a strong banking foundation with dynamic asset growth from $3B-$100B (2K-14K employees). He tripled brand awareness and strengthened operational portfolio across multiple revenue pools such as credit cards, private banking, asset management, debt capital markets, consumer & commercial loans. While at BBVA Compass, Sánchez was a director of the American Bankers Association, the Institute of International Bankers, the Greater Houston Partnership, the Financial Services Roundtable and BITS (the technology policy division of FSR).
At Rice’s Jones School of Business and Department of Statistics he teaches disruption in financial services with a focus on cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Sánchez is an advisor to several financial technology and blockchain start-up companies, including Spring Labs, which specializes in credit and identity data; Securitize, a digital asset securities firm; and Topl, a Houston-based company focused on ethical and sustainable practices. He also serves on the board of the Center for Houston’s Future.
A graduate of Yale University, Sánchez has master’s degrees in international relations from the London School of Economics and in advanced European economics from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium.
Dexter Senft
Dexter Senft finished his Rice degree in mathematics, mathematical sciences and economics in three-and-a-half years and decided to start a summer job on Wall Street in January 1974 while waiting to start on his master’s. Forty-two years later he was still on Wall Street. Initially, he inhabited a world of mainframe computers, punch cards and COBOL. Transactions took a week or more to process and securities exchanged hands physically, in paper form. Personal computers would not exist for another decade.
Senft convinced his management to purchase a virtual memory time-sharing system, which came with 240k of main memory. He had to code his own math and graphics libraries. He once spent a full day coding a random-access database in assembly language, only to lose it when the system’s auto-save feature failed during a power outage. He re-coded it the next day but has never trusted auto-save since.
Senft gained fame by publishing a mathematical explanation of mortgage securities and how to predict their cash flows. In 1983, he led the First Boston team that created the first Collateralized Mortgage Obligation (CMO), thereby launching the field of structured mortgage finance. His team developed and deployed the first computer language to describe structured bonds. He also built models and published research in fixed income futures and options. This body of work would later result in his induction into the Fixed Income Analyst Society Hall of Fame.
Senft rose to the ranks of senior management at First Boston and Lehman Brothers and has overseen departments such as Quantitative Research, Counterparty Credit, Mortgage Finance, Product Development, Global Economics, eCommerce, Electronic Trading and Strategic Investments. He has served on two dozen boards in both the profit and not-for-profit sectors. After the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008, Senft was hired by Morgan Stanley to build an automated trading system for bonds and foreign exchange. It took a little over five years, and he retired from Morgan Stanley in 2015.
Senft is enjoying retirement because he has a robust list of hobbies. He is a Life Master at bridge, a private pilot, a collector of science and aviation historical documents, a constructor of crosswords and other word puzzles, and he still spends hours at computer coding whatever his latest project is. At present, he’s building an optimizer for turning pictures into Lego-Art.
Leticia Velazquez, Ph.D.
Leticia Velazquez is the director of operations for the Tapia Center at Rice University. In addition to directing the Tapia Center and Camps operations, as well proofreading and editing two books of University Professor and Director of the Center Dr. Richard Tapia. Velazquez is interested in developing, implementing, and analyzing large-scale nonlinear programming algorithms to support decisions by improving the accuracy of predictive solutions. Before joining Rice, Velazquez was a full professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and director of the Computational Science Program at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP).
Xifan Wang, Ph.D.
Xifan Wang is the quantitative research analyst for Salient’s energy infrastructure complex. His primary responsibilities include statistical research and analysis of market data as well as the building and management of quantitative models. Prior to joining Salient in Jun. 2020, Wang served as a researcher at Rice University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy where he mainly focused on statistical modeling in condensed matter physics and optical topics. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from Rice in 2020, an M.S. in materials engineering from the University of Dayton in 2013, and a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Sichuan University in 2009.
William Wojciechowski, Ph.D
William Wojciechowski, a chief risk officer for Vaughan Nelson Investment Management, holds over 20 years of experience in investment management and financial analysis. He has been with Vaughan Nelson since 2007, a globally recognized investment manager based in Houston, TX. From 2004 to 2007, he was a senior quantitative financial analyst at Koch Capital Markets. After earning his doctorate in statistics from Rice University in 2001, he was a senior quantitative financial risk analyst with American General Investment Management, L. P., and a mathematical/computational finance research associate at Rice. Before coming to Texas, Wojciechowski was a developer and lecturer for West Virginia University’s Department of Statistics and Computer Science from 1996 to 1997. While earning an M.S. in statistics from West Virginia University in 1996 he was also a mathematical statistician for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/ National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health/Division of Safety Research. Wojciechowski received his B.S. in statistics and applied mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992.
Event Organizers
Katherine Ensor, Ph.D.
Katherine Ensor is Rice’s Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics and director of the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems (CoFES). She has been a Rice faculty member since 1987 and is one of the founding members of the statistics department.
As an expert in many areas of modern statistics, Ensor applies innovative statistical techniques to answer important questions in science, engineering, and business with a specific focus on the environment, energy, and finance. She specializes in multivariate time series, categorical data, spatial-temporal stochastic processes, and sampling. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has been widely recognized for her leadership, scholarship and mentoring.
Ensor is the 117th President of the American Statistical Association, is a member of the National Academies Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) and serves on the Board of Directors of the NSF Institute on Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM). She holds a B.S.E. and M.S. in mathematics from Arkansas State University and a Ph.D. in statistics from Texas A&M University.
John Dobelman, Ph.D.
John Dobelman, a professor in the practice of statistics and associate director of CoFES, has a strong background in engineering and leadership. He also directs the Professional Master’s in Statistics (MStat) program.
Prior to joining Rice, Dobelman was a pricing scientist in the Department of Science and Research (S&R) at PROS Revenue Management. Before PROS, he owned and operated a financial engineering laboratory. Prior to his statistics career, he was lead engineer and manager for engineering, program management and implementation engineering/installation for terminal air traffic control communications, surveillance, and navigation and landing systems for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Facilities & Equipment program.
Dobelman has a Ph.D. in statistics from Rice University. He also has a master’s degree in public management, entrepreneurship and international business from Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Management.