Manmohan Kumar
Fellow
The Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy at Georgetown McDonough is a top destination for financial policy analysts and researchers. Guided by Professor Reena Aggarwal, the Center provides thought leadership for global finance, convening academics, policymakers, regulators, industry leaders, students, and institutional decision makers from its home in Washington D.C. The Psaros Center is an intellectual honest broker, facilitator, and educator that serves as the intersection between practitioners and policymakers – fostering discussion and debate on global finance and its role in broader societal problems.
Our Team
Reena Aggarwal
Founding Director
Robert E. McDonough Professor of Business Administration and Finance
Dr. Aggarwal specializes in financial markets; market regulation; short term funding markets; IPOs; capital raising; ETFs; corporate governance including proxy voting, executive compensation, and director elections; role of institutional investors; ESG attributes of firms; and FinTech, digital assets, and Central Bank Digital Currencies. She has had tremendous impact at the intersection of financial markets and policy globally. She has served in several leadership roles including Vice Provost for Faculty for Georgetown’s Main Campus, Interim Dean, and Deputy Dean of the McDonough School of Business. Furthermore, she has been a Visiting Professor of Finance at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, a FINRA Academic Fellow, an Academic Fellow at the U.S. SEC, and a Visiting Research Scholar at the IMF, World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Financing and Capital; Fulbright Scholar to Brazil; and Distinguished Scholar at the Reserve Bank of India’s CAFRAL. Her research and analysis are regularly cited in Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, CNBC, and CNN, among others.
She is an award-winning teacher and has been voted as the Outstanding Professor by EMBA students; named among “Outstanding Faculty” in the Business Week Guide to the Best Business Schools; and described as the Favorite Professors of the ‘Best & Brightest’ Executive MBAs, Poets and Quants. She was honored with the Allan N. Nash Distinguished Doctoral Graduate Award by University of Maryland, and the Distinguished Alumnus Award by BITS Pilani.
LEARN MORE ABOUT Dr. AGGARWAL…
David Vandivier
Executive Director
David Vandivier brings over two decades of experience at the highest levels of financial policy to the new role, including in the White House, U.S. Treasury Department, U.S. Senate, and, most recently, BNY Mellon, where he was co-head of government affairs. Before joining BNY Mellon in 2015, Vandivier was senior advisor to the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service and chief of staff at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama White House. Previously, he was deputy assistant secretary for budget and tax at the U.S. Treasury Department and director of strategic planning and outreach on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. He holds an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and a B.A. from Franklin College of Indiana.
Lee Pinkowitz
Associate Director of Student Engagement
Associate Professor of Finance
Lee Pinkowitz is an associate professor of finance at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. Professor Pinkowitz arrived at Georgetown in 1999 after receiving his PhD from The Ohio State University. Professor Pinkowitz is an award-winning researcher in the areas of corporate cash holdings and corporate governance. His research has been published in top finance journals and is widely cited. Along with co-authors, he has won the Jensen Prize for best paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics and the William F. Sharpe Award for Scholarship in Financial Research, for the best paper published in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. Professor Pinkowitz has won the annual MBA Distinguished Teaching Award four times and the Joseph F. LeMoine Award for Undergraduate and Graduate Teaching Excellence twice.
Claire Liang
Associate Director
Associate Teaching Professor of Finance
Claire Liang is an associate teaching professor of finance at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Liang’s research focuses on issues in empirical asset pricing and corporate finance, especially regarding uncertainty and its impact on asset prices, finance and growth, and entrepreneurial finance. She has published scholarly articles in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Portfolio Management, International Review of Finance, Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, and The Developing Economies.
Liang has seven years of investment banking experience with Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. She earned a PhD in finance from the University of Alberta in Canada, an MBA with a finance concentration and a PhD in materials science and engineering from Cornell University, and a B.S. in Physics from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Prior to joining Georgetown, Liang taught at the University of Maine and Southern Illinois University and received the Cherry-Hill Business Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award from SIU (2019). She enjoys sharing her industry experience with students and advising students on finance career-related issues.
Ellie D’Andria
Assistant Director
Ellie D’Andria graduated from George Washington University in 2022 with a B.A. in education policy and child development. Prior to her new role at the Psaros Center, she was a research assistant in the George Washington University psychology department, co-authoring scholarly works published in the Journal of Genetic Psychology; the Society for Research in Child Development, 2021 Virtual Biennial Meeting; and the Association for Psychological Science, 2023 Annual Convention. She also created and hosted an independent podcast in 2022, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered: A Love Letter to Music Education,” advocating for greater access to music education in the United States.
Andrew Devine
Program Coordinator
Andrew Devine is the program coordinator for the Psaros Center assisting in the day-to-day operation of the center. Before joining the Psaros Center, he worked as an intern for a government relations firm on Capitol Hill. Devine graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 2022 with a B.A. in Economics.
Visiting Fellows
Frank Hatheway
Frank Hatheway served as chief economist for Nasdaq and led the Economics and Statistical Research Department. His team is responsible for a variety of projects and initiatives in the United States and Europe to improve market structure, encourage capital formation, and enhance trading efficiency. A regular participant in industry events for both issuers and traders, he has appeared before the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Congress to discuss a variety of issues around the equities and derivatives markets. His research work includes identifying the causes of the May 6, 2010, market break, evaluating enhancements for the markets, and exploring the implications of proposed exchange mergers.
Hatheway’s background prior to joining Nasdaq combines academics and regulation with industry experience. He was a finance professor at Penn State University and a researcher in market microstructure. He has authored academic articles in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Intermediation, and other leading finance journals. He has served as an economic fellow and senior research scholar with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, worked as a derivatives trader, and earned his PhD in economics from Princeton University.
Marshall Lux
Marshall Lux has been a financial services consultant and practitioner for over 30 years and advises a number of companies, including those focused on consumer credit provision, wealth management, insurance, and cybersecurity. He has performed due diligence for many of the largest private equity deals that have been done and has worked with a broad network of financial services C-suite executives. Lux began his career at McKinsey & Company where he served all types of financial services firms across a variety of subsectors and functional areas. He eventually led McKinsey’s private equity practice, leaving McKinsey after approximately 25 years to become the chief risk officer for Chase (all consumer products globally) during the 2008 financial crisis. He then joined the Boston Consulting Group, where he was a senior partner for five years and helped build a private equity practice while serving financial institutions.
Along with his client work, Lux has done dozens of pro bono assignments and served on a number of not-for-profit boards. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Lux received his MBA from Harvard Business School and graduated summa cum laude from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.
Student Affiliates
- Will Burke
- Maxwell Bassin
- Kelly Grace Richardson
- Siona Mondal
- Nadia Nasim
- Pavlos Tentomas
- Ava Uditsky
- Hailey Walker
- Julian Wang
- Alex Yu
- Holden Zerega
