The other female French quant who can transform your career in finance
Looking to learn from the best quants in finance? Few do it like the French and the name you likely are already thinking of is the mother of quants, Nicole El Karoui.
More recently, though, another French woman has been stealing the headlines. Her name is Hélyette Geman, and she just won the award for financial engineer of the year from the International Association for Quantitative Finance.
Previous recipients of this award include AQR Capital Management founder Cliff Asness and former Morgan Stanley MD Martin Liebowitz, placing Geman in esteemed company.
Geman is currently a research professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and director of the Commodity Finance Centre at Birkbeck University in London. A number of her students have gone on to achieve impressive roles.
Perhaps the most influential of her PhD graduates is Nassim Taleb, who worked with Geman on 'The Microstructure of Dynamic Hedging' in 1998. As well as becoming a Credit Suisse MD, he wrote one of the most influential books of the modern era, The Black Swan, originating the theory of the same name.
Her most recent PhD graduate is Yunaye Ma, who wrote 'Crude Oil and Electricity Storage'. Since graduating from Johns Hopkins in 2022 he's secured a position at Morgan Stanley as a quantitative strategist associate in New York.
At her other school, Birkbeck, Lovjit Thukral got a position as quant at JPMorgan after graduating in 2015. He wrote is thesis on 'ETF and ETN Trading strategies in the Commodities Space.'
Those unwilling to commit to a PhD can still learn from Geman through other courses ran at Birkbeck. These include a 'Derivatives Across Asset Classes' short course and Birkbeck's MFE program.
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