Gregory Brown is a native of Dallas, Texas. In 1990 he received his Bachelors of Science with honors in Physics and Economics from Duke University. Subsequent to graduation, he worked in Washington, DC for the Board of Governors of Federal Reserve System in the Division of Research and Statistics. His responsibilities included current analysis and macroeconomic forecasting of the business investment sector.

In 1998, he was granted a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Texas at Austin Graduate School of Business. His dissertation research centered on the choice of financial derivative contracts for use by non-financial corporations as risk management tools. Other research interests include computational finance, derivative pricing theory, and investor sentiment.

Prof. Brown is on the faculty of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has taught corporate finance and seminars on financial derivatives. Currently, he teaches macroeconomics in the MBA core curriculum.

He has consulted for money management firms, software developers, and Fortune 500 companies on various aspects of financial risk management. His research has been presented at meetings of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, the Financial Management Association, the International Association of Financial Engineers, the Chicago Board of Trade, and the Annual Conference on Derivatives as well as numerous research universities. Prof. Brown has published in leading academic and practitioner finance journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Derivatives, the Financial Analyst Journal, and RISK. He is also the co-editor (with Donald Chew) of Corporate Risk: Strategies and Management (Risk Publications).

Barbara Kavanagh (kavanagh@chipar.com), Principal, Barbara Kavanagh has over five years' risk management consulting experience with major financial institutions and international governments globally. Prior to her current work, she was the senior credit officer in ABN AMRO's investment banking arm in the US. She was also a senior executive within the Federal Reserve involved in policy making on a number of trading, securities, and clearing-related matters. Her areas of expertise include payment and settlement systems, trade finance, and credit and market risk management processes across a number of cash and derivative products. She also has experience in litigation support, largely relating to mortgage-backed securities.

Marsha Courchane is the Director, Financial Strategy and Research in the Housing Economics and Financial Research Division at Freddie Mac. Her research focuses on issues of affordable lending, lending to minorities, international mortgage markets and subprime lending. Dr. Courchane has published broadly in the areas of housing economics, applied econometrics, financial economics, and discrimination in lending. Prior to coming to Freddie Mac in 1999, she served as Senior Financial Economist at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency from 1994 - 1999, supervising and researching statistical studies of fair lending practices large U.S. national banks. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She holds an adjunct associate professor position in finance and real estate at American University and has held previous faculty positions at North Carolina State University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, and Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Robert R. Johnson, CFA, joined AIMR in September 1996 as a vice president in the Department of Curriculum and Examinations. He previously taught at Creighton University and achieved the rank of full professor in the economics and finance department. Mr. Johnson received the universitywide Robert F. Kennedy award for teaching excellence in 1994. He has published over 30 publications in finance and economics journals, including the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance, Financial Analysts Journal, and Journal of Portfolio Management. Mr. Johnson holds a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

Michael Mauboussin is a Managing Director and Chief U.S. Investment Strategist at Credit Suisse First Boston Corporation in New York City. He is also a member of the firm’s Investment Policy Committee and is co-Chair of the firm’s Diversity Advisory Board.

Mauboussin’s work focuses on the process of value creation from both the company’s and the investor’s standpoint. His multi-disciplinary approach draws ideas from various fields, including finance, strategy, psychology, and complexity theory. Mauboussin’s ideas have been featured by a number of national publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Business 2.0, Forbes, and The Daily Deal. He is also highlighted in the books The Super Analysts (Andrew Leeming), The Warren Buffett Portfolio (Robert Hagstrom), and Stock Picking (Richard Maturi).

He is the co-author, with Alfred Rappaport, of Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns, published by Harvard Business School Press in the fall of 2001. Peter Bernstein contributed the book’s foreword and it received strong endorsements from a number of investment luminaries. Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen said, “A paradigm-setting book of this quality emerges within a field only once a generation.” Mauboussin has also authored or co-authored articles for the Harvard Business Review, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Financial Management, and Fortune.

Mauboussin has been an adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Graduate School of Business for the past decade. His Security Analysis class is consistently among the top-rated courses at the school. BusinessWeek’s Guide to the Best Business Schools highlighted Mauboussin as one of the school’s “Outstanding Faculty”, a distinction received by only seven professors.

Mauboussin joined CSFB in 1992 as an analyst following the packaged food industry. He is the former President of the Consumer Analyst Group of New York and was repeatedly named to Institutional Investor's All-America research team and the Wall Street Journal All-Star survey in the food industry category.

Mauboussin received a B.A. in government from Georgetown University. He is also on the Board of Trustees at the Santa Fe Institute, a leading center for multi-disciplinary research in complex systems theory. He lives in Darien, CT with his wife and five children.

Lawrence J. White is the Arthur E. Imperatore Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He has served in the U.S. Government three times: During 1986-1989 he was a Board Member on the Federal Home Loan Bank Board; during 1982-1983 he was the Chief Economist of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice; and in 1978-1979 he was a Senior Staff Economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Among his publications is The S&L Debacle: Public Policy Lessons for Bank and Thrift Regulation (Oxford University Press, 1991.

Peter M. Zorn is Vice President of Housing Economics at Freddie Mac. Prior to this position, he served as Director, Financial Strategy and Policy Research in the Housing Economics and Financial Research Division. His research interests include fair lending, consumer behavior, financial literacy and housing economics. He has published numerous articles in the real estate and housing economics areas. From 1982-1994, Peter spent twelve years as an assistant and associate professor in the Department of Consumer Economics and Housing at Cornell University. Peter serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Housing Economics, The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, and Real Estate Economics. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California-Davis in 1982 and a BA in History from Marlboro College in 1975.