Teachers

Scot Adams, University of Minnesota School of Mathematics   -   Scot Adams is Professor of Mathematics and Director of Financial Mathematics in the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota.

He started his Bachelor's degree at the University of Minnesota, then transferred to Cornell University, finishing in 1978. After working for two years as an actuarial student at Lutheran Brotherhood (now Thrivent), he began graduate studies at the University of Chicago, receiving his PhD in under the direction of Robert J. Zimmer. Prof. Zimmer was instrumental in starting the Financial Mathematics program at Chicago.

After graduate school, Prof. Adams held postdoctoral positions at Stanford University and the University of Chicago, before coming to the University of Minnesota in 1992.

He is married with two children, both boys, who keep him very busy!

William A. Barr, Evergreen Investment Management Company, LLC   -   is Senior Vice President, Director of Fixed Income Risk Management at Evergreen Investments in Charlotte, NC. Previously he was Vice President, Investment Risk Management - Fixed Income at RiverSource Investments in Minneapolis, MN; Chief Investment Officer for South Financial Asset Management in Greenville SC and the Director of Fixed Income Quantitative Research, Zurich Scudder Investments in Chicago, IL. He also has experience as a fixed income trader of US Treasuries, US Agencies, MBS and Investment Grade Bonds. Bill taught fixed income for the University of Chicago's Program in Financial Mathematics.

Bill holds M.S., Financial Mathematics, University of Chicago; M.B.A., Finance, University of Chicago; M.Sc., Economics, London School of Economics and B.A., Economics, Claremont Mckenna College. He is also a CFA charter holder.

Chris Bemis, Whitebox Advisors   -   Chris is a quantitative analyst for Whitebox Advisors, working primarily on equity market modeling outside of the United States. He is also an active researcher for the Whitebox quantitative group, where he works on varied problems in the context of equity, derivative, and fixed income strategies.

Dr. Bemis earned his PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Minnesota. His thesis work involved both modeling and optimization for portfolios of risky assets.

John Dodson, RiverSource Investments   -   John has been a V. P. with the Investment Risk Management team at RiverSource Investments since 2002. John entered industry through a fixed-term posting with the banking department of the BIS, where he had the opportunity to review the original Value-at-Risk model on behalf of the Basle Committee. Following that assignment, John joined the proprietary derivatives trading function at Credit Suisse in Zurich where he remained until 1995 when he returned to the States to pursue a master's degree. John then shifted into risk management, working in New York and London for several years before returning to Minneapolis. In addition to his affiliation with the math program, John has taught financial derivatives for the Carlson School of Business.

John has a BS degree in physics and mathematics from Stanford University and an MS degree in computational finance from Carnegie Mellon University. John was an UMTYMP student in the 80's and participated in a mentorship program for high school students with the U's physics department.

Gary Hatfield, Securian   -   Dr. Hatfield is currently Investment Actuary for Securian Financial Group in St. Paul (the parent company of Minnesota Life Insurance Company). The focus of his work is financial risk management. In addition to work on enterprise risk management, asset liability management, economic value of insurance liabilities and economic capital, he is responsible for oversight and implementation of Minnesota Life's derivatives based hedge programs.

He earned his PhD in mathematics from the University of Minnesota, is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, a member of the American Academy of Actuaries and is also a CFA charter holder. Previous to entering the insurance field in 1998, he taught mathematics at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

Philip A. Jones, Ameriprise Financial   -   Phil Jones, Vice President of Quantitative Strategies for Ameriprise Financial, has responsibility for the design, development and implementation of financial applications and hedging platforms for the variable annuity living benefit riders within Ameriprise Financial. Phil and his staff are also responsible for the mathematical modeling and programming, platform architecture and data management for the living benefit rider product.

Phil earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Minnesota, with concentrations in Probability. Phil previously earned an M.A. in Mathematics from Oxford University in England. Phil also serves as a fire fighter and Emergency Medical Technician for the Eden Prairie Fire Department, MN.

Sandra Paterlini, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia since 2002.   -   Sandra Paterlini is an Assistant Professor in Statistics at the Faculty of Economics, University of Modena and Reggio E. since 2002. She is a member of the ERCIM (European Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) Working group in Optimization Heuristics in Estimation and Modelling, of CEFIN and RECent. She holds a MSc Financial Mathematics from the University of Warwick (UK) and a PhD in Computational Methods for Financial and Economic Decision and Forecasting from the University of Bergamo (IT). She has been visiting scientist at EVALife Group, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Aarhus (DK) and at the Chair of Financial Econometrics, Department of Statistics, LMU Munich.

She has extensive teaching experience as instructor on postgraduate and undergraduate courses on statistics, financial times series analysis, derivatives, computational finance and data-mining. She has been consultant on business projects related to style analysis, portfolio optimization and the development of an internal credit rating model for bank clients.

Christopher Prouty, Securian Financial Group   -   Chris is serving as the instructor for FM 5091/5092: Programming and Presentation in Finance.

Chris began his financial career as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a B.S. in applied economics, he accepted a job with FCStone, a commodity risk management firm. There he executed trades in commodity derivatives and worked marketing risk management strategies to firms with commodity price exposure. Chris now works for Securian Financial Group in St. Paul, MN, where he is involved in the administration of systems used in asset and liability modeling.

During college and shortly thereafter Chris operated a small software consulting firm, CP Consulting. He has completed freelance software development projects for Twin Cities firms, including the University of Minnesota Foundation and ACR ATI, a firm which offers employee testing services to the health care industry.

Carlos Tolmasky, Cargill   -   Carlos Tolmasky is a derivatives trader at Cargill Petroleum. He joined Cargill in 1996 as a member of their Research Group focusing on the development and implementation of derivatives models for fixed income and commodities markets. He later joined the petroleum group as a "desk quant" and, more recently, as a derivatives/relative value trader.

The author of various papers in financial journals, Dr. Tolmasky holds an undergraduate degree (Licenciado) from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in mathematics from the University of Washington.