Finance Department Welcomes New Leadership, Faculty Focusing on Emerging Topics

The Whitman School’s Department of Finance has seen some exciting changes over the past year. Three new faculty members joined the department in fall 2022, bringing with them expertise in emerging topics that have piqued students’ interests. In addition, on July 1, long-time faculty member Professor David Weinbaum stepped into the role of department chair.

David Weinbaum, Department Chair, Professor of Finance

While Professor of Finance David Weinbaum has been a part of the Whitman School faculty since 2009, he recently accepted the position of department chair. Weinbaum is a Harris Fellow in finance, and, in addition to teaching investments to undergraduate students, his current research involves empirical asset pricing and derivatives. Among many published works, he has two forthcoming articles: “Inferring Aggregate Market Expectations from the Cross-Section of Stock Prices” with Turan G. Bali and D. Craig Nichols, 2022, in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis; and “Option Trading Activity, New Release, and Stock Return Predictability” with Andrew Fodor, Dmitriy Muravyev and Martin Cremers, 2022, in Management Science.

Weinbaum is looking forward to contributing as chair and eager to see how the new faculty members will continue to expand the study of finance into new areas of interest that are drawing students to the major.

“These young faculty members are already contributing tremendously, benefiting our students in classes and through their research,” he says. “They are bringing students trending topics like business analytics and fintech — and a lot of energy. It’s not just the courses they are teaching but also the research they do. These contributions, along with the work of the entire finance faculty, help students receive a better education and gain value in their degrees, making them more sought after as they enter the workforce.”

Si Cheng, Associate Professor of Finance

Si Cheng joined the finance faculty at Whitman in fall 2022 as an associate professor with tenure. This is the first time she has taught in the United States, after being an assistant professor of finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a lecturer/assistant professor of finance at Queen’s University in Belfast.

Cheng’s research includes sustainable investing, the application of machine learning to asset pricing, and the welfare implications of delegated asset management. She has published in numerous journals and publications, such as the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. She has received more than $200,000 in competitive grants as principal investigator from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Cheng also received the IQ-KEP Research Prize in 2020, and she serves as the associate editor of the Journal of Multinational Financial Management and is a young editorial board member of the China Finance Review International.

Cheng has brought her research and experience into the classroom, teaching undergraduates from across all majors the fundamentals of finance. “We talk about a variety of topics — from how CFOs make long-term investments and the optimization and allocation of resources to how to understand home mortgage terms or save for retirement,” she explains. “I found that in the U.S. students are very responsive and tend to ask more questions. It’s like a big family at Whitman, and there is a great sense of belonging.”

Candace Jens, Assistant Professor of Finance

Assistant Professor of Finance Candace Jens was thrilled to return to her hometown to join the Whitman faculty in 2022, after being an assistant professor at Tulane University. She is teaching financial analytics, a topic that student have become increasingly interested in the past few years.

“We are living in a world with so much incredible data available to us, and it is valuable for us to teach students how to turn this raw information into something useful in business,” she says.

Jens’ current courses focus on data tools that are valuable in the financial context and also cover real equity problems — like who gets a mortgage, for example — that not only cross over into other areas of business but also politics, law and more.

Her research is focused on firm valuation, equity investing and econometrics, and she has been published in the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.

Jens admires the Whitman culture that “meets students where they are and helps them succeed both academically and personally” and is thrilled to join the School during its expansion in the area of data analytics. “Students are very excited about the study of analytics and clearly want more of it,” she says.

Yu Shan, Assistant Professor of Finance

Financial technology — or fintech — is growing at a rapid pace, and Whitman students are eager to gain these skills that combine finance with areas like IT, computer science, engineering and entrepreneurship. To meet that need, Whitman welcomed Assistant Professor of Finance Yu Shan to the faculty in 2022. Before joining Whitman, Shan taught finance and pursued research focused on banking, financial intermediation, fintech, consumer finance, social networking and managerial behavior at Concordia University in Montreal. He saw Whitman as an opportunity to expand his work and also be geographically closer to his wife and baby daughter, who are in New York City.

Last year, Shan was tasked with developing a special topics course on fintech for both graduate and undergraduate students, which debuted last spring and was particularly well received by those students about the enter the job market.

“Fintech has become a vital component to attracting students interested in studying business,” he says. “The Whitman School recognizes that a growing emphasis in this area will continue to raise its profile, while also preparing students with skills they need to be competitive in this fascinating and rapidly growing space. I look forward to having a role in that success.”