Stern Investment Management & Research Society

A number of distinguished Stern faculty and industry professionals serve as advisors to SIMR:

Edward Altman
Max L. Heine Professor of Finance | Stern School of Business

Edward I. Altman is the Max L. Heine Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business. He is the Director of Research in Credit and Debt Markets at the NYU Salomon Center for the Study of Financial Institutions.

Dr. Altman has an international reputation as an expert on corporate bankruptcy, high yield bonds, distressed debt and credit risk analysis. He received his MBA and Ph.D. in Finance from the University of California, Los Angeles. He was inducted into the Fixed Income Analysts Society Hall of Fame in 2001, President of the Financial Management Association (2003) and a FMA Fellow in 2004 and was amongst the inaugural inductees into the Turnaround Management Association Hall of Fame in 2008. In 2005, Prof. Altman was named one of the "100 Most Influential People in Finance" by the Treasury & Risk Management magazine.

Dr. Altman's primary areas of research include bankruptcy analysis and prediction, credit and lending policies, risk management and regulation in banking, corporate finance and capital markets. He has been a consultant to several government agencies, major financial and accounting institutions and industrial companies and has lectured to executives in North America, South America, Europe, Australia-New Zealand, Asia and Africa. He has testified before the U.S. Congress, the New York State Senate and several other government and regulatory organizations and is a Director and a member of the Advisory Board of a number of corporate, publishing, academic and financial institutions. He has been Chairman of the Academic Council of the Turnaround Management Association since 2002.

Jim K. Liew
Adjunct Professor of Finance  | Stern School of Business

Dr. Jim Liew obtained his Ph.D. in Finance from Columbia Business School and has spent many years within the hedge fund industry. He is currently the CEO of JKL Capital Management, LLC. Dr. Liew has previously worked at a +$13 billion macro futures fund and a high-frequency NYC-based statistical arbitrage fund, where he built, back-tested, and implemented systematic strategies. 

Dr. Liew has extensive business experience within the hedge fund-of-funds industry as well. Such experiences include: starting a successful fund-of-funds business that eventually spun out of The Carlyle Group, managing the World Bank's pension fund direct investments into hedge funds, and sourcing hedge funds and creating institutional investment products for a managed account platform. 

Dr. Liew has published numerous papers with regards to hedge fund investing and quantitative investment strategies. He currently spends his time: building "better" hedge fund benchmark indices, consulting and advising individuals/institutions on alternative investment opportunities. Dr. Liew serves on the CAIA Hedge Fund Curriculum Committee.

Robert Whitelaw
Edward C. Johnson 3d Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance  | Stern School of Business

Robert Whitelaw is the Edward C. Johnson 3d Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance and Chair of the Finance Department at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University. He has a Ph.D. in finance from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business, and a B.S. in mathematics from MIT.

Professor Whitelaw teaches investments/capital markets and international finance in the undergraduate, MBA and executive programs. His research interests include the relation between risk and return in the stock and bond markets, stock return predictability, the pricing and hedging of fixed income derivative securities, and risk management. His papers have been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies, as well as practitioner journals such as the Financial Analysts Journal, the Journal of Derivatives and the Journal of Fixed Income.

Professor Whitelaw provides consulting services to corporations and financial institutions, specializing in risk management and equity trading. He is also Chief Investment Strategist and a member of the advisory board of IndexIQ, a developer of next-generation indexes.

Tony Kao
Managing Principal and Chief Investment Officer  | SECOR Asset Management

Tony is a Managing Principal and Chief Investment Officer of SECOR Asset Management, an asset management firm based in New York and London that offers investment advisory, solutions-focused portfolio management and multi-strategy alpha products.  Prior to founding SECOR, Tony was the Chief Investment Officer of General Motors Asset Management (GMAM), where his responsibility was the management of the $130 billion global employee benefit related plans of General Motors and its affiliates.

He currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Investment Management and Journal of Investment Consulting.  In the past, he also served on the editorial board of Financial Analysts Journal and Program Committee of the "Q" Group. He was the recipient of the R.L. Rosenthal Award for the Innovation in Investment Management/Corporate Finance in 1991. The yearly award is to recognize the contribution of under-35 years old professionals to the fields of literature, medicine, filmmaking and finance in the United States. He also received the National Asian-American Corporate Achievement Award in 1992. He earned his M.B.A. in Finance from New York University.  His articles have been published extensively in various finance journals and books.

Michael Weinberg
Chief Investment Strategy | Protégé Partners
For more than two decades Michael has invested directly at the security level and indirectly as an asset allocator in traditional and alternative asset classes. He is Chief Investment Strategist at Protege Partners, where he is a Senior Managing Director, and on the investment, risk and management committees. Michael is also an adjunct Associate Professor of Economics and Finance at Columbia Business School, where he teaches Institutional Investing: Alternatives in Pension Plans, an advanced MBA course that he created. He spent nine years at FRM, a multi-strategy fund of fund where he headed the equity business and was on the investment, asset allocation and management committees. Prior to that, Michael was a portfolio manager at Soros, and at Credit Suisse First Boston. Before that he was a Real Estate analyst at Dean Witter.  He has a BS from New York University, an MBA from Columbia Business School and is a CFA.