CDM welcomes two new professors

Pierre Collin-Dufresne has been appointed as Full Professor of Finance at the Swiss Finance Institute @ EPFL (SFI). He is known for his important contributions to the study of the evolution of interest rates, and the risks related to companies going out of business. He was one of the first scientists to put forward a generic method of taking account of the phenomena of contagion of assets subject to credit risk. This work is particularly relevant at a time when financial institutions and central banks are trying to develop better models of the evaluation of defaulting risks. It’s worth noting that he worked at Goldman Sachs in New York.

Thomas Weber has been nominated as Associate Professor in Operations Management and will serve as the new director of the Management of Technology & Entrepreneurship Institute (MTEI). He is internationally recognized as an expert in operations and information management. His research led to the development of a series of practical tools that are used in the business sector. He pioneered quality-weighted ranking of search results which is now widely used by Yahoo and Google. As part of a research cooperation with a leading credit-card issuer, Weber also developed a method for joint estimation and optimization for the repayment of outstanding credit-card debt. Before joining EPFL, he worked as a senior consultant for the Boston Consulting Group (1998-2002) and as a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University (2003-2011).