Chicago Booth Investment Competition & Conference

Elizabeth Burton

CIO

Hawaii Retirement System

Elizabeth Burton is the CIO of the Employees’ Retirement System of the State of Hawaii, where she oversees over $16 billion in assets. Prior to joining HIERS, Ms. Burton served as Managing Director, Quantitative Strategies Group, at the Maryland State Retirement Agency. In this role, Ms. Burton was responsible for the $4.5B Absolute Return Portfolio and for risk management oversight of the $55B Plan. Previously, Ms. Burton owned William Street Advisory—a strategic advisory practice which she founded in 2013. Prior to that role, Ms. Burton was a Senior Economist with Criterion Economics. Prior to that role, Ms. Burton was a Consultant at First Annapolis where she worked on M&A transactions and consulting in the payments industry. Previous positions include roles in trading, hedge funds, and risk management. Ms. Burton received her Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and French, cum laude, from Washington & Lee University, and her MBA in Finance, Econometrics & Statistics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Johara Farhadieh

Executive Director & CIO

Illinois State Board of Investment

Johara Farhadieh serves as the Executive Director and Chief Investment Officer at the Illinois State Board of Investment (“ISBI”), managing an $19.5 billion dollar defined benefit fund and a $4 billion dollar deferred compensation (“DC”) plan for the State Employees’ Retirement System, the General Assembly Retirement System, the Judges’ Retirement System of Illinois, the Illinois Power Agency, as well as the State of Illinois Deferred Compensation Plan.  In this position, Mrs. Farhadieh is responsible for all investment operations, managing and executing ISBI’s investment policies and assisting the trustees in the strategic direction of ISBI.

Mrs. Farhadieh received her Master of Business Administration with honors from the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University and a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the DePaul University College of Commerce.

Ravi Mattu

Global Head of Analytics

PIMCO

Mr. Mattu is a managing director and global head of analytics in the Newport Beach office. He oversees portfolio management analytics, client facing analytics and the asset expert team in the Advisory group. Prior to joining PIMCO in 2011, Mr. Mattu was head of research and strategy for Citadel Securities and previously served as Citadel Investment Group's chief fixed income strategist. Before joining Citadel, he worked at Lehman Brothers for 17 years and held a number of senior positions, including global head of equities and fixed income research, head of quantitative fixed income research and head of securitized product research. He has 37 years of investment experience and holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and a graduate degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from GB Pant University in India.

Zhiguo He

Fuji Bank and Heller Professor of Finance

University of Chicago Booth

Professor He is interested in the implications of agency frictions and debt maturities in financial markets and macroeconomics with a special focus on contract theory and banking. His recent research focuses on the role of financial institutions in the 2007/08 global financial crisis. He is also actively conducting academic research on Chinese financial markets that have been undergoing rapid development, including the stock market, local government debt, shadow banking, and interbank markets together with recent regulation changes; in relation to this research, he teaches a newly created elective MBA course, “Chinese Economy and Financial Markets.” Besides research in Chinese financial markets, he has also been writing academic articles on new progress in the area of cryptocurrency and blockchains. His research has been published in leading academic journals including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Financial Economics. He has been an associate editor for the Review of Financial Studies and Management Science and currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Finance.

Karen Umland

Senior Investment Director

Dimensional Fund Advisors

Karen is a Senior Portfolio Manager and a member of the Investment Committee at Dimensional. Her responsibilities include general oversight of portfolios, and she frequently speaks at presentations and meetings with clients, prospects, and consultants.

Karen joined Dimensional in 1993 as a general Portfolio Manager in US equities after beginning her investment career with the Yale University Investment Office in 1988. In 1995, she moved over to the international Portfolio Management group within Dimensional and spent the next 14 years directly involved in the portfolio construction and trading of the non-US developed and emerging markets strategies. A CFA® charterholder, Karen has a BA in economics from Yale University and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yueran Ma

Assistant Professor of Finance and Liew Family Junior Faculty Fellow

University of Chicago Booth

Yueran Ma’s main research interest is empirical studies at the intersection of finance and macroeconomics. Her work covers topics including low interest rates and financial markets, debt contracts and macroeconomic implications, non-financial firms and financial frictions, and expectations in finance and macroeconomics. Her research often draws on insights from behavioral economics, and applies new approaches such as simple randomized experiments. She has also worked on questions in real estate and urban economics. She received B.A. summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in Applied Mathematics in 2014, and Ph.D. in Business Economics in 2018, from Harvard University.

Carter Davis

Finance PhD Candidate

University of Chicago Booth

Mr. Davis is a fifth-year University of Chicago Booth Finance PhD Candidate. His research focuses on empirical asset pricing and his research interests include return predictability, liquidity, trading volume, bubbles, investor learning, and the statistical comparison of cross sectional asset pricing models. He applies tools from machine learning and nonparametric statistics in order to understand some of the market forces that influence returns and risk.

John C. Heaton

Joseph L. Gidwitz Professor Of Finance

University of Chicago Booth

John C. Heaton studies asset pricing, portfolio allocation, and time-series econometrics. His research in these areas has earned him numerous fellowships, including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship from 1993 to 1995, and a National Science Foundation Fellowship from 1993 to 1998.

Prior to joining the Chicago Booth faculty in 2000, Heaton was the Nathan S. and Mary P. Sharp Distinguished Professor of Finance at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He also has held positions at MIT's Sloan School of Management and at the Hoover Institution. Heaton is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. The practical problems investors and institutions face are a key component of his teaching.

Originally from Canada, Heaton earned a bachelor's degree in commerce at the University of Windsor in 1982, a master's degree in economics from the University of Western Ontario in 1984, and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1989. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 2000. Outside of academia, Heaton enjoys music, skiing, and sailing.