Day 1: “Pracademic” Keynote

Vinay Nair, PhD

Found and Chairman of 55IP; Visiting Professor at The Wharton School (Penn) and The Sloan School (MIT)

Vinay Nair is the Founder and Chairman at 55ip. Dr. Nair was the Founding Principal at Ada Investment Management LP where he helped form an investment platform and team to design portfolio solutions using financial research and quantitative methods. Prior to founding Ada, Dr. Nair was research director at Old Lane, a hedge fund firm founded by senior executives at Morgan Stanley.

Dr. Nair is a visiting professor at The Wharton School and at The Sloan School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), having previously been a full-time faculty member at The Wharton School, and has also been a visiting professor at The University of Pompeu-Fabra (Barcelona), University of Amsterdam, The Indian School of Business and the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. His teaching interests are in private equity, investment management, entrepreneurship, and fintech. He authored “Investing for Change” in 2008. Dr. Nair completed his PhD in Financial Economics from the Ne York Universiy Leonard N. Stern School of Business with an award for the best thesis. Dr. Nair received a B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Madras), where he was awarded the Governor’s Gold Medal for curricular and extra-curricular excellence.

Day 2: Academic Keynote

Darrell Duffie, PhD

Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at Stanford University

Darrell Duffie’s research interests include over-the-counter markets, banking, financial risk management, credit risk, valuation and hedging of derivative securities, financial market infrastructure, the term structure of interest rates, financial innovation, security design (including legal treatments at failure resolution), and market design. Recently, Duffie has focused on how capital moves from one segment of asset markets to another, and the implications of imperfect trading opportunities for asset price behavior, especially in over-the-counter markets.

Darrell Duffie is the Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He is a Fellow and member of the Council of the Econometric Society, a Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the board of directors of Moody’s Corporation since 2008. Duffie was the 2009 president of the American Finance Association. He currently chairs the Market Participants Group, charged by the Financial Stability Board with recommending reforms to Libor, Euribor, and other interest rate benchmarks. Duffie’s recent books include How Big Banks Fail (Princeton University Press, 2010), Measuring Corporate Default Risk (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Dark Markets (Princeton University Press, 2012).