Faculty

Svetlozar (Zari) Rachev,, Professor

Svetlozar (Zari) Rachev, MF program co-director, holds the rank of Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Texas Tech University. Dr. Rachev is one of the world’s foremost authorities in the application of heavy-tailed distributions in finance. He was a co-founder and President of Bravo Risk Management Group, originator of the Cognity methodology. Bravo was acquired by FinAnalytica, where Zari served as Chief Scientist. He served as the Frey Family Foundation Professor in Quantitative Finance in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook University; Chair-Professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; and Professor Emeritus of Statistics and Applied Probability at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of 14 books and over 300 published articles on finance, econometrics, probability, statistics and actuarial science. He has supervised over 50 PhD and MS students in his career

W. Brent Lindquist, Professor

W. Brent Lindquist, MF program co-director, holds the rank of Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Texas Tech University. Prior to joining Texas Tech, Dr. Lindquist served as Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook University where he helped lead the transition of that department to one of the top 10 applied math programs in the country. Brent has developed numerical methods for: PDEs; flow in porous media; automated 3D image analysis for porous media, neuron, and fiber analyses; Riemann problems in 2D; hierarchy formation in social animal groups; and numerical solution of Feynman diagrams. He is a co-recipient of the Lee Segal prize from the Society of Mathematical Biology. He was one of the founding developers of the Frontier package used to study flow at field scales and is the principal architect of the 3DMA-Rock code for studying flow at the pore-scale. He was a founder of the company that marketed Frontier, and has commercially licensed his 3DMA-Rock code. Dr. Lindquist has over 100 publications, has presented his research in 25 countries on five continents, and participated as PI or co-PI in $20M of grant funding. He has supervised over 35 PhD students.

A. Alexandre Trindade, Professor

A. Alexandre Trindade holds the rank of Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Texas Tech University. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Colorado State University and was an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Florida prior to joining Texas Tech’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. His main research interests include: time series; multivariate volatility modeling; state-space models and longitudinal data; saddle point-based bootstrap methodology and applications; asymptotic theory and higher-order approximations. His work on saddle point-based bootstrap has been funded by the National Security Agency. Dr. Trindade has extensive consulting experience; in 2003-04 he was the primary statistical consultant on a reliability project with The Boeing Company funded by DARPA, and in 2005 was contracted by Encision, Inc., for a reliability study on medical devices.

Jason Bailey, Lecturer and Research Associate

Jason Bailey is a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Texas Tech University. He received his M.S. in Statistics from Texas Tech’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. His main research interest is in hedonic pricing of real estate. He is currently working on understanding the importance of environment and policy factors in such pricing. He is also the course coordinator of and main faculty member for the Department’s undergraduate MATH 2345 Financial Statistics courses.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Current Ph.D. Students

Omotade Blessing

Jagdish Gnawali

Thisari Mahanama

Affiliated Researchers

Frank J. Fabozzi, John Hopkins’ Carey School of Business

Frank J. Fabozzi is a financial economist who is currently Professor of Practice at John Hopkins’ Carey School of Business. He was previously on the finance faculty at EDHEC Business School, Yale School of Management, and a visiting professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, and New York University. He earned his PhD in Economics from CUNY. Frank has authored and edited multiple books and more than 250 research papers on investment management and financial economics. He is the co-developer of the Kalotay-Williams-Fabozzi model of the short rate used in the valuation of interest rate derivatives. Frank has been the editor of the Journal of Portfolio Management since 1986 and is the co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Financial data. He has served on the board of directors of the BlackRock complex of funds since 1988.

Stefan Mittnik, Scalable Capital

Stefan Mittnik is a Professor of Financial Econometrics (retired) at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich and a Fellow at the Center for Financial Studies in Frankfurt and at the CESifo Research Network in Munich. He is also the co-founder of Europe’s leading robo-advisor, Scalable Capital. He works in the areas of financial econometrics, time series analysis, risk management, and on issues of real and financial sector interactions. Dr. Mittnik received his PhD in economics and applied mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis. He was previously on the faculty of Stony Brook University and the University of Kiel, Germany. He has been a member of the Economics Review Board of the German Science Foundation, a member of the scientific advisory board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, has served on the supervisory board of Union Investment, one of the leading German mutual fund companies, and on the editorial boards of several scientific journals.

Yuan Hu, University of California San Diego

Dr. Hu received her PhD from Texas Tech University in 2022. She is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at UCSD. Her expertise is in option pricing in complete markets with non-Gaussian returns.

Davide Lauria, University of Calabria

Davide Lauria is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, Statistics and Finance, University of Calabria, Italy. He earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Bergamo in 2017, and worked in the same institution as a postdoctoral researcher for a year. Davide joined Texas Tech as a postdoctoral teaching and research scholar in the fall of 2018. His research interests include financial mathematics, applied probability and stochastic programming.

Thilini Mahanama, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka

Thilini Mahanama received her PhD from Texas Tech University in 2021. She is a lecturer in the Department of Industrial Management at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. Her expertise is in financial risk management related to natural disasters.  

Jiho Park, Citigroup

Jiho Park received his Ph.D. degree in Financial Mathematics from Sogang University in 2013. He was working at Stonybrook University as a visiting scholar before coming to Texas Tech as a postdoctoral scholar the fall of 2018. Dr. Park is currently a risk analyst with Citigroup. His research areas are probability distribution models, risk management and option pricing in financial mathematics, and numerical methods in finance.

Abootaleb Shirvani, Kean University

Abootaleb Shirvani received his Ph.D. from Texas Tech University in 2021. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Kean University, Union, NJ. His expertise is in the application of Lévy subordinated processes to finance.