Fellows

Lakshmi Balasubramanyan is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Indiana State University. She received her Ph.D. in Agricultural, Environmental & Regional Economics with her major fields being Finance and Production Economics from The Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include international financial markets and institutions, production analysis, risk management, credit analysis in commercial banking and the efficiency of financial inputs to entrepreneurship. Her present research focuses on commercial bank size, risk variability and how cost inefficiency can be a signal of bank vulnerability. 

M. Kabir Hassan is a financial economist with consulting, research and teaching experiences in development finance, money and capital markets, corporate finance, investments, monetary economics, macroeconomics, Islamic banking,  international trade and finance. He has published five books and over 70 articles in refereed academic journals and has presented over 100 research papers at professional conferences globally and has provided consultant services to several national and international organizations and governments.  Dr. Hassan is an associate professor of finance at the University of New Orleans, where he has been recognized for for his research and has seven times won an Outstanding Teacher Award.  Dr. Hassan holds an M.A. in economics and a Ph.D. in finance from University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Hassan is involved with several professional, civic and cultural organizations. He is on the Board of Directors of the Academy of Financial Services, the Asian Pacific American Society, the New Orleans Museum of Arts, and the Association for Economic and Development Studies on Bangladesh, USA. Dr. Hassan has been elected as the President of the Academy of International Business-SW, the Association for Economic and Development Studies on Bangladesh (AEDSB), and the Southwestern Society of Economists (SSE). A frequent traveler, Dr. Hassan gives lectures and consulting advice in the US and abroad.

W. Jean Kwon holds an MBA in risk management and insurance from The College of Insurance in New York (now known as the School of Risk Management of St. John’s University) and a Ph.D. in the same field from Georgia State University. He is a Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter (CPCU).  He taught insurance at Georgia State University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. In Singapore, he also provided consulting services to insurance companies and organizations in the region and worked as Director of Special Projects, Insurance Department, Monetary Authority of Singapore. In the United States, he worked as curriculum director at the American Institute for CPCU. He has authored several books, including Risk Management and Insurance: Perspectives in a Global Economy and Risk Management and Insurance in Singapore. He currently teaches the School of Risk Management, continues to publish papers in academic and professional journals, presents research findings at various conferences, serves editorial boards of several journals, and advices multiple insurance institutions in the United States and abroad. He helped to establish Asia-Pacific Risk and Insurance Association and organize World Risk and Insurance Economics Congress.

Angela Lyons is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin.  Her research focuses on issues related to household economics, family finance, and financial education and program evaluation.  Her current research examines issues related to household liquidity and credit access, health and financial strain, delinquency and bankruptcy, gender and marital differences in household financial decisions, and the credit usage and financial education needs of young adults.  Dr. Lyons has been identified by the U.S. Government Accountability Office as one of twenty-three national leaders in financial education and was invited to participate in the U.S. Comptroller General’s forum in 2004 on “Improving Financial Literacy: The Role of the Federal Government.”  In 2003, she presented testimony on the importance of financial literacy for young adults before the Subcommittee on Education and the Workforce for the U.S. House of Representatives.  In 2002, she was a delegate to the National Summit on Retirement Savings in Washington, D.C.   Recently, she served as a consultant to the Executive Office of the U.S. Trustees providing expertise on the debtor education component of the bankruptcy reform law.

Una Okonkwo Osili is an associate professor of economics at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.  Dr. Osili’s main areas of research include savings and private transfers in developing and developed countries.  Her current research focuses on issues related to financial market participation of immigrants and other low-income households in the U.S.  She has also examined the remittances, and savings decisions in developing countries.  In 2003, Dr. Osili served as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago undertaking a project on the financial assimilation of U.S. immigrants.  She has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.  In 2006, she was awarded the Stevenson Fellowship from the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council.  She received her bachelor’s degree in economics with honors from Harvard University and her M.A and Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University.  She has served as a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the United Nations Economic Commission

Art Sherwood is an Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business at Indiana State University.  He works closely with the Networks Scholars program to develop theoretically sound and pedagogically exciting seminars and workshops for the scholars.  He has taught university courses in the US, Poland and Hungary, including strategic management, leadership, management principles, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship and international business.  His research interests focus upon the strategic implications of leadership, trust and learning in inter- and intraorganizational relationships, including domestic and international strategic alliances.  He has published his work in professional journals including Journal of Financial Service Professionals, Leadership and Organizational Studies and Journal of Management Education.  His current research focuses on small bank strategies and their performance and economic development implications, leadership/managerial development and on strategic issues in organizational relationships.  He has worked extensively with industry as an employee, consultant and executive educator.  He received his Ph.D., M.A. and M.B.A from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and his B.B.A from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Sharon Tennyson is Associate Professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University.  Dr. Tennyson is a noted expert on economic and policy issues related to insurance and has published extensively on topics related to government regulation of insurance markets, insurance fraud, insurance distribution and consumer attitudes and knowledge of insurance.  Her research has received funding from a variety of sources including the National Science Foundation, and has been published in high quality economics, insurance and finance journals and in prestigious edited collections.  Dr. Tennyson is a member of several national organizations and editorial boards and is a past president of the Risk Theory Society.  She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University, and was previously on the faculty of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 

R. Christopher Whalen is co-founder and managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, with responsibility for sales, marketing and business development.  He has worked as an investment banker, research analyst and journalist for more than two decades.  Whalen contributes regularly to publications such as Barron's, The International Economy and American Banker. He has appeared before the U.S. Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission to testify on a variety of financial issues and speaks on topics such as XBRL, investing and corporate governance.  Mr. Whalen volunteers as a member of the New York and Washington Steering Committees of Professional Risk Managers International Association and edits a blog on regulation and risk management.  After graduating from Villanova University in 1981, Mr. Whalen worked for the U.S. House of Representatives and then as a management trainee and in the bank supervision and foreign exchange departments at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  He then worked in the fixed income department of Bear, Stearns & Co, in London. After returning to the United States in 1988, he spent a decade providing risk management and loan workout services to multinational companies and government agencies operating in Latin America. In 1997, he returned to Wall Street, working as an investment banker in the mergers and acquisitions group of Bear, Stearns & Co. and later Prudential Securities. He then served as the managing director of The Free Internet Group Ltd., one of the largest independent Internet service providers in the United Kingdom. In 2001, Mr. Whalen returned to investment banking, working as a banker at Fechtor, Detwiler & Co. and an equity research analyst at Ramberg, Whalen & Co. 

Dr. Jing Jian Xiao is Professor of Consumer Economics at the University of Rhode Island. He teaches courses in consumer economics and finance and conducts research on consumer financial behaviors. Currently he is involved in a NEFE-funded research project to study the relationship between financial behaviors and well-beings of college students. He has published extensively in areas of consumer finance and economics including several books such as Mathematics of Personal Financial Planning, Chinese Youth in Transition, and Handbook of Consumer Finance Research. His research papers have been published in Eastern Economic Journal, Family and Consumer Science Research Journal, Financial Counseling and Planning, International Journal of Consumer Studies, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of Consumer Education, Journal of Family and Economic Issues, Journal of Personal Finance, Social Indicators Research, etc. He is active and playing a leadership role in national organizations in the field of consumer economics and finance, served as the President and co-Program Chair of American Council on Consumer Interests (ACCI), the President of Asian Consumer and Family Economics Association (ACFEA), the Program Chair and Proceedings Editor of Association for Financial Counseling and Planning Education (AFCPE), among others. He is currently serving on the board of National Consumer League. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Family and Economic Issues and also serves on editorial boards of several other academic journals in consumer economics and finance. He is the editor-in-chief of a new book series entitled International Series of Consumer Science. He presented his research to diverse audiences in the U. S., Switzerland, China, Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan. He is the visiting professor at several universities in China. In summer 2009, he will be a visiting professor at the Yamaguchi University, Japan. He received his B. S. and M. S. in economics from the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in China, and Ph.D. in consumer economics from the Oregon State University. In 2005-07, he was the Take Charge America Professor and Director of the Take Charge America Institute for Consumer Financial Education and Research at the University of Arizona.