Dear students and colleagues,
This newsletter is an initiative which we planned to start many years ago and never had time to do it. I suppose, in some way we may have covid to thank for its inception. This horrible disease made us think of new ways to stay in touch and continue to connect. Even though most educators think online learning is the future of learning, the experience I had made me value traditional education even more. I believe general knowledge may be imparted in an online manner. However, specialized technical concepts must be explained in person. I get feedback from the students’ reactions and that allows me to conduct my lectures in a dynamic way.
Our plan in establishing this newsletter is to keep our community updated with the latest activity of the Hanlon labs and Hanlon Financial Center. You will find articles related to research and to our student activity while at Stevens and after graduation. I will try to keep you updated with our most recent developments.
In the fall 2020, despite the pandemic we ran Financial Engineering seminars almost every week. The Hanlon Center director George Calhoun became extremely active sharing his take on financial markets on Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/?sh=469a1c643483. Dr. Calhoun was one of the principal investigators submitting a large grant to establish the first National Science Foundation Center dedicated to Financial Technology and Science at Stevens, in collaboration with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. We are in the phase 2 of this proposal which featured among others our own SHIFT project (Stevens High Frequency Trading simulator). Our faculty published numerous papers during the pandemic.
I want to recognize the FE Ph.D. students graduating in summer and fall 2020: Jiacheng Fan, Thiago Winkler Alves, Yangyang Yu, and Alex Gurvich. Further, the students who completed a Master thesis in our Finance programs: Sriram Kashyap Prasad, Agathe Sadeghi, Xiaoning Zhu. We had six students graduating with a 4.0 GPA who I want to recognize: Ang Li – MSFE, Mary Nyone – MSFE, Ivan Bakrac- MSFA, Kunal Kumar- MSFE, Laura Murphy- MSFA, and especially Jiacheng Fan - FE Ph.D. Congratulations to all!
Most of our lab students are now employed despite the pandemic. Our credit rating research group led by Dan Wang published two papers in the fall with more projects on the way.
Our new site is now at https://fsc.stevens.edu/. We completely redesigned this site to contain all information related to our activities. We welcome any suggestions (send to fscadmin@stevens.edu). Our Hanlon labs mailing list is hfslstudents@lists.stevens.edu. Please use this link to register to the mailing list using your Stevens email: https://lists.stevens.edu/mailman/listinfo/hfslstudents
Due to the pandemic, during the spring semester Bloomberg agreed to allow our students to access Bloomberg terminals remotely. Furthermore, at the end of 2020 we acquired a site license for Capital IQ which is another tool you can use. Instructions about how to access these and other data platforms may be found at: https://fsc.stevens.edu/tag/databases/
Finally, to request access to our resources please use this link: https://fsc.stevens.edu/request-resources/
I wish you a great semester!
Ionut Florescu
Hoboken, New Jersey
February 1 2021