Hosts & Speakers

Professor George Calhoun bridges technology entrepreneurship and academic finance at Stevens Institute of Technology, where he directs the Quantitative Finance program, the Hanlon Financial Systems Research Center, and serves as Managing Director of CRAFT—the National Science Foundation-backed Center for Research Toward Advancing Financial Technologies. His work focuses on the intersection of technology and markets, preparing the next generation of asset management talent and fintech leaders.

Before joining academia, Professor Calhoun spent 25 years as a technology entrepreneur and executive, co-founding InterDigital Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: IDCC) and serving as Chairman and CEO of Illinois Superconductor Corporation. He has extensive experience in capital markets, leading public offerings, private financings, M&A transactions, and due diligence assessments for major private equity and hedge fund firms.

Professor Calhoun is author of Price & Value: A Guide to Equity Market Valuation Metrics (Springer/Apress) and a Forbes contributor covering markets, technology, and financial innovation.

Paul Das is Founder and CEO of ProFundCom, the leading digital marketing platform for asset managers and hedge funds. Since founding the company in 2003, Paul has built an integrated platform that unifies email, data, web, and social media activity in one integrated system. The result: digital engagement analytics that drive sales and marketing effectiveness for fundraising and measurable AUM.

Paul remains hands-on in leading product development and client teams while setting company strategy with the executive board. Over two decades, ProFundCom has become the industry standard for how fund managers leverage digital marketing to attract and retain investors.

Previously, Paul founded eMiddleware, which was acquired by Oracle, and serves as founder and board member of Clearview Financial Media. His software expertise was honed at AT&T, Microsoft, and Apple in both the UK and USA.

Paul holds a first-class degree in Electronic Systems Engineering from Kingston University, where he won the Cadence Design Prize for his final year project.

Art Silva leads digital engagement across Fidelity Institutional, one of the largest investment platforms in the world. As Senior Vice President and Head of Digital Engagement & Martech Solutions, he oversees the foundational strategies for client acquisition, engagement, and retention across Fidelity's institutional and wealth management channels.

Art joined Fidelity in 2019 as Vice President of Campaign and Content Marketing for Fidelity Institutional before being promoted to his current role. Prior to Fidelity, Art led marketing for a major business unit at Honeywell, reflecting his cross-industry perspective on digital transformation.

Mr. Silva earned his B.S. in industrial technology management with a minor in communications from Rhode Island College. He also holds executive leadership certifications from the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and from Wharton through SIFMA’s Financial Industry Executive Leadership Program. Mr. Silva also holds FINRA Series 7 and 24 licenses.

Ashley Cheretes is Prudential Financial's first Director of Generative AI, where she pioneers the strategy and implementation of generative AI tools and technology across one of the world's leading financial institutions. In this groundbreaking role, Ashley leads enterprise-wide AI initiatives that transform customer experiences, redefine marketing strategies, and unlock growth opportunities across creative development, sales enablement, and customer experience.

With deep expertise in large language models, AI agents, and responsible AI deployment, Ashley ensures that emerging technologies deliver measurable business value while maintaining regulatory compliance and ethical standards. Her work is setting new standards for how Fortune 500 financial institutions can successfully navigate the complexities of AI adoption at scale.

Prior to leading Prudential's generative AI initiatives, Ashley served as Marketing Director for Digital Strategy at Prudential Advisors, where she drove digital transformation initiatives supporting 3,000 financial professionals nationwide and generated significant growth in advisor recruitment and client acquisition.

Ben Hunt is co-founder of Perscient, an AI research firm that pioneered the use of language models and unstructured data analysis for investment strategies. He founded Epsilon Theory in 2013, a newsletter and website read by more than 100,000 professional investors and allocators for its application of narrative and game theory to market dynamics.

Ben has managed a billion-dollar hedge fund and served as chief strategist and chief risk officer for a $13 billion asset manager. He has researched narrative and unstructured data for more than 30 years, beginning with his doctoral work at Harvard University. Before entering finance, he was a tenured professor of political science and has co-founded three technology companies built on his research.

Jessica Fernandez leads global marketing for Direxion, one of the largest providers of leveraged and inverse ETFs with approximately $50 billion in assets under management. Appointed Global CMO in 2025, she is focused on extending the firm’s presence across products, channels, and international markets, while strengthening Direxion’s leadership in investor education on complex vehicles.

Jessica brings more than 20 years of asset management marketing experience. Before joining Direxion, she served as CMO of Calamos, head of North American retail and institutional marketing at Invesco, and held senior marketing and sales roles at Oppenheimer Funds, CION, and AllianceBernstein. She began her career at Morgan Stanley.

Jessica holds a B.S. in Business Administration with a concentration in Finance from Monmouth University and maintains FINRA Series 7, 63, and 24 licenses.

Jessica is from a proud Stevens alumni family.

Dan Simon has spent 20 years helping the financial industry tell its story. He is founder and CEO of Qwoted, a platform that connects journalists with expert sources across the industry, and co-founder and Chairman of Vested, an integrated communications firm for financial services.

Applying entrepreneurship to building professional communities, Dan also co-founded Financial Narrative, the financial marcomms thought leadership organization, and co-chairs the Communications Advisory Board for the Museum of American Finance.

Dan is the author of The Money Hackers: How a Group of Misfits Took On Wall Street and Changed Finance Forever (HarperCollins), which traces how outsiders and technologists rewired the financial system. He has led communications campaigns for Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley, and American Express.

Douglas Cumming, J.D., Ph.D., CFA, is one of the most cited researchers in business and economics in the world: ranked in the top 100 globally by Clarivate, with over 34,000 citations across 260 published articles. He holds the Steven Shulman '62 Endowed Chair for Business Leadership at Stevens, where he teaches finance and researches the intersection of capital markets, entrepreneurship, and regulation.

Prof. Cumming is the Managing Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Alternative Investments and the Review of Corporate Finance, and has edited six Oxford Handbooks covering private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, IPOs, and crowdfunding. He has published 23 academic books, including Venture Capital and Private Equity Contracting and Hedge Fund Structure, Regulation and Performance around the World.

Before joining Stevens, Prof. Cumming held endowed chairs at Florida Atlantic University and York University in Toronto. His work has been covered in The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker.

He completed the 2023 Florida Ironman in 13 hours and 6 minutes.

Ionut Florescu, Ph.D. is Research Professor of Financial Engineering at Stevens. Dr. Florescu also serves as Director of the Hanlon Financial Systems Lab and Director of the Financial Technology and Analytics program.

His research spans stochastic processes, high-frequency finance, and machine learning in financial markets — with a focus on rare events, market microstructure, and systems under stress. His work is also about applying sound mathematical modeling across science and engineering: from computer vision and cryptography to geophysics, oceanography, meteorology, and biomedicine.

Dr. Florescu has organized multiple NSF-funded international conferences and has received research grants from the CME Foundation, UBS, and the NSF-backed CRAFT center. His doctoral students now hold senior roles at JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Interactive Brokers.

Prof. Florescu is a driving force for the Stevens High Frequency Trading Competition, a worldwide event for university teams to deploy algorithmic trading strategies on SHIFT, Stevens' proprietary simulation platform.

He is the author of several books on probability, stochastic processes, and financial engineering, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the High Frequency journal. Dr. Florescu earned his Ph.D. in Statistics from Purdue University, and degrees in Mathematics and Stochastic Processes from the University of Bucharest.

Zachary Feinstein, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Financial Engineering at Stevens. He also serves as Co-Director of Ph.D. Programs. Prof. Feinstein studies what happens when financial systems break. His research focuses on financial contagion, systemic risk, and the mathematics of how failures cascade through interconnected networks. His work has been published in Operations Research, the European Journal of Operational Research, Finance and Stochastics, and the SIAM Journal on Financial Mathematics.

More recently, Dr. Feinstein has turned that lens on emerging financial technology. His work on decentralized finance and automated market makers through the NSF-backed CRAFT center examines the structural risks embedded in DeFi protocols. He also led a CRAFT research project applying AI to compliance reviews, exploring how machine learning can detect regulatory issues that traditional processes miss.

At Stevens, Prof. Feinstein teaches machine learning, natural language processing for financial applications, time series analytics, and pricing and hedging. He earned his Ph.D. in Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton.

Paul Magnone leads global strategic alliances at Google, building partnerships across artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and emerging technologies. With over 30 years in the field, he has a track record of translating complex technology into business impact.

Co-author of Decisions Over Decimals: Striking the Balance Between Intuition and Information (Wiley, 2022) and Drinking from the Fire Hose: Making Smarter Decisions Without Drowning in Information (Portfolio/Penguin, 2011), Paul and his co-authors developed "Quantitative Intuition" (QI), a framework for combining data science with executive judgment.

At IBM, he launched four global consulting practices that generated over $1 billion in new revenue. He also held leadership roles at Deloitte Consulting and several startups. Paul holds four patents and has mentored in the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program.

At Columbia Business School, Paul teaches courses on data-driven decision-making and quantitative intuition. He serves on the Management Board of Advisors for Stevens Institute of Technology's School of Business, where he earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Technology Management.

His work has been featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and at industry conferences worldwide.

Rich Kerr is the lawyer fund and asset managers call when they need to know what they can and can’t say, sell, or build. He advises mutual funds, ETFs, investment advisers, and broker-dealers on the full range of SEC and FINRA regulatory issues that govern the investment industry.

Rich is leading the new Boston office for Haynes Boone, a leading international law firm ranked among the top 100 in the U.S. with over 700 lawyers in 20+ global offices.

Rich has spent over 20 years counseling fund sponsors, directors, and trustees. In addition, he has become a leading voice on the compliance implications of digital assets, cryptocurrency, and blockchain.

He co-authored “Tokenizing Traditional Markets” in The Review of Securities & Commodities Regulation and the ETF Handbook. Rich has spoken at the Fund Directors Conference, the ETP Forum, and dozens of regulatory and compliance events on topics ranging from marketing and crypto to AI.

Rich earned his J.D. from Suffolk University Law School, cum laude, and his B.A. from Boston University.

Rick Lake is founder of Narrative Alpha, a consultancy that builds thought leadership, digital distribution strategies, and communications programs for asset managers and alternative investment sponsors. He is the creator of the Promptwright™ framework and the 7 Prompt Archetypes, tools that help financial professionals harness generative AI to accelerate growth.

Rick co-founded Lake Partners, Inc., one of the early alternative investment consulting firms, growing it from startup to over 5 billion in advisory assets. He co-launched one of the first daily liquid alts fund-of-funds, achieving a 5-star Morningstar rating and more than 550 million in assets. He has testified at the SEC Hedge Fund Roundtable and co-edited a foundational reference book on private equity and venture capital.

Rick has lectured at Boston University's Digital Business Institute and spoken at the Morningstar Investment Conference, LinkedIn, MIT, Yale, and the London Business School. His work has been featured in Barron's, Bloomberg TV, and other national media.

A Harvard graduate in Folklore & Mythology, Rick studies how narrative patterns and oral tradition inform modern AI architecture, recasting timeless storytelling frameworks as practical tools for the age of AI.