Speaker Introduction



Dr. Oldrich Alfons Vasicek works in mathematical finance, particularly on development of quantitative models of firms, financial instruments and financial markets. He was a founding partner of KMV Corporation, a firm pioneering the use of structural models for credit valuation. Earlier in his career, he was a Vice President in the Management Science Department of Wells Fargo Bank, a consultant to Gifford Fong Associates, and a special adviser to Moody’s KMV. His academic appointments included five years of teaching graduate finance at the University of Rochester, the University of California at Berkeley, and at Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales (ESSEC) in France. A native of the Czech Republic, he holds a Ph.D. in probability theory from Charles University in Prague. He has published over 30 articles in financial and mathematical journals and has received a number of honors, including the Graham and Dodd Award, the Roger F. Murray Prize, the Award of the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance, the IAFE Financial Engineer of the Year Award, and the Risk Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award. He has been inducted into the Derivatives Strategy Hall of Fame, the Fixed Income Analysts Society Hall of Fame, and the Risk Magazine Hall of Fame. His theory of the term structure of interest rates is generally recognized as a genesis of that field in finance.