Dr Nick Firoozye

Dr. Nick Firoozye is a mathematician with over 20 years of experience in the finance industry, in both buy and sell-side firms, in research, structuring and systematic trading. He started his finance career in Lehman Brothers doing MBS/ABS modelling, heading teams in Portfolio Strategy and EM Quant Research, later taking a variety of senior roles at Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank, and at asset managers and hedge-funds, Sanford Bernstein, Citadel, and Exodus Point, in areas ranging from Quantitative Strategy, Relative Value Strategy and Trading, to Asset Allocation. He is currently Managing Director and Head of FI Systematic Trading at a small securities trading shop in NY. He is an Honorary Professor in Computer Science at University College London, focusing on Online Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Robust Machine Learning and of course Statistics in Finance. Two of Nick’s PhD students have completed their degrees, and he has six doing areas in quant finance from systematic trading to recommender systems. He co-authored a book, entitled Managing Uncertainty, Mitigating Risk, about the role of uncertainty in finance, in light of the many recent financial crises. Nick began teaching Algorithmic Trading Strategies as a PhD reading course in 2015 and since then Nick adapted the material for a few online courses and created an MSc course by the same name which has run for the past 4 years. Nick has had over 500 students successfully taking his online and UCL courses to date. Nick got his PhD at Courant Institute, NYU, and taught for a number of years at U of MN, Heriot-Watt, University of Bonn, NYU, and then finally at University of Illinois where he was an Asst Prof, before leaving academia for Wall Street.

Dr Brian Healy

Dr Brian Healy is a mathematician with over 20 years experience in financial markets as a quant, trader, researcher and strategist. He began his career as an exotic options quant & trader with extensive experience in all asset classes, particularly fixed income and foreign exchange, at leading investment banks including Citigroup, Barclays Capital and Deutsche Bank. In addition to his core responsibilities of pricing and managing risk he also designed a large number of original strategies and indices for clients and for internal risk taking. Since leaving banking he has run a very successful consultancy business which specialises in building models using the latest mathematical, statistical and machine learning techniques. Clients include asset managers, market-making firms, private capital firms as well as tech companies. Brian is an expert in all aspects of markets, particularly quantitative strategies, options and other derivatives and predictive modelling. In addition to his work with industry he is also an industry professor of machine learning and data analytics at UCL, a lecturer in finance at UCD, a researcher and lecturer in mathematical and computational finance at Stanford University, is an author of many peer reviewed papers in mathematical finance and frequent speaker at conferences and seminars.

Christina Qi: CEO, Databento

Christina Qi is the CEO of Databento, an institutional market data provider. She formerly founded Domeyard LP, a hedge fund focused on high frequency trading (HFT) that traded up to $7.1 billion USD per day. Failing to earn a job offer after a Wall Street internship, Christina started Domeyard from her dorm room with $1000 in savings, in 2012. Her fund was a tiny minnow amongst the tigers of the hedge fund world, but after Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys came out in 2014 and HFT firms hid from the spotlight, Domeyard accidentally found itself in the center of the ring. Over the next decade, her company’s story was featured on the front page of Forbes and Nikkei, and quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, NBC, and the Financial Times as a result of the controversy and fascination with HFT. By a series of accidents, Christina became a voice in her industry, contributing to the World Economic Forum’s research on AI in finance, guest lecturing at dozens of universities, and teaching Domeyard’s case study at Harvard Business School. She is grateful to be able to open up about her mistakes, and to help people turn failures into opportunities. After a decade, Domeyard winded down gracefully after facing increased headwinds to its strategies, scalability, and operational resources.

No amount of therapy has quashed Christina’s impostor syndrome, but she will always be proud of her non-profit volunteer work. Christina is a member of the MIT Corporation Development Committee, a standing committee of the MIT Corporation (the board of trustees), charged with raising critical financial resources to uphold the Institute’s academic rigor, promote student life, and advance global initiatives. From 2018 to 2023, she co-chaired the Development Committee and eventually became Co-Chair of the Board of Invest in Girls, bringing financial literacy education to underserved populations across the US. Christina also sits on the Board of Directors of The Financial Executives Alliance (FEA) Hedge Fund Group, drove entrepreneurship efforts at the MIT Sloan Boston Alumni Association (MIT SBAA), and served on the U.S. Non-Profit Boards Committee of 100 Women in Finance. Although “X Under X” lists are a gimmick, she’ll admit that Forbes 30 Under 30 made a positive impact on her life by giving her a community – friends who dragged her out of bed during the lowest days of her life. Christina holds a Bachelor of Science in Management Science from MIT and is a CAIA Charterholder.