Our Team
Thomas Walker
Academic Lead and DirectorThomas Walker is a full professor of Finance at Concordia University. Prior to his academic career, Dr. Walker worked in the German consulting and industrial sector at such firms as Mercedes Benz, Utility Consultants International, and KPMG. His research interests are in sustainability & climate change, aviation, corporate governance, and risk management and he has published over fifty articles and edited books in these areas. He previously served as Director of the David O’Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, as Laurentian Bank Professor in Integrated Risk Management, as Chair of the Finance Department, and as Associate Dean, Research, at Concordia University.
Dieter Gramlich
Academic LeadDieter Gramlich is a full professor and the head of the Banking Department at Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg (DHBW) in Heidenheim, Germany. Previously he was the Deputy Chair of Finance and Banking, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, and was a visiting Professor at Cleveland State University, and a visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He is well published and has had multiple research semester stays including Japan, USA, and Canada (JMSB, Concordia.) His areas of expertise include opportunity and risk analysis, opportunity and risk management, early warning systems, and sustainable finance.
Stefan Wendt
Academic PartnerStefan Wendt is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Programs in Business at Reykjavik University’s Department of Business. From March 2005 until March 2015 he was Research and Teaching Assistant at the Department of Finance at Bamberg University, Germany, where he received his doctoral degree in 2010. He has taught as a visiting lecturer at École Supérieure de Commerce Montpellier, France, and Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW), Mosbach, Germany. His fields of research include corporate finance and governance, risk management, financial markets and financial intermediation, small and medium-sized enterprises, and behavioural finance.
Aoran Zhang
Academic PartnerDr. Zhang is an assistant professor at Nottingham University’s Business School. His research interests include corporate governance, risk management, and political connections. His current research work focuses on insurance companies and their exposure to climate change related natural disasters. Specifically, he explores whether and how the profitability, premium income, and stock price performance of insurance companies are affected by natural disasters and how insurance companies can improve their modelling techniques to better reflect the susceptibility of their policy holders to natural disaster risks.
Sherif Goubran
Academic PartnerSherif Goubran joined in as an instructor in the department of Architecture (School of Sciences and Engineering) at the American University in Cairo. He completed his PhD at the Individualized Program (INDI) at Concordia University in 2021. His PhD research was funded by several prestigious grants and awards including the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. He is conducting interdisciplinary research within the fields of design, architecture, building engineering and real-estate finance. His work investigates the alignment between sustainable building practices and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Sherif completed a MASc in building engineering in 2016 with a focus on energy efficiency in commercial buildings. Before that, he completed a BSc in Architecture at the American University in Cairo (AUC-Egypt).
Thomas Kaspereit
Academic PartnerThomas Kaspereit is an Associate Professor in Financial Accounting at the University of Luxembourg. He obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Oldenburg, Germany, in 2013. His research focuses on the effect of corporate sustainability and sustainability disclosure on the market value of firms. In addition, he is interested in water risk, corporate governance, and firms’ accounting choices.
Xueying Zhang
Academic PartnerXueying Zhang is a full professor of Finance at ShanDong University of Finance and Economic in China. He holds a PhD degree in Finance from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, His research interests are in fixed income, risk management, corporate finance, and monetary policy. He won the Grant from National Natural Science Foundation of China, and was visiting scholar at Concordia University, Universite Laval, University of Saskatchewan in Canada. Among many Chinese Journals, his articles have also been published in Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Journal of International Money and Finance, Financial Markets, Institutions & Instruments.
Christian Fieberg
Academic PartnerChristian Fieberg is a researcher at the University of Bremen (Germany) and represents the field of empirical capital market research and derivatives. He conducted research and taught at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), University of the Free State (Bloemfontein, South Africa), University of Hamburg (Germany) and University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg). His research focuses on topics such as asset pricing, portfolio management, and econometrics, the use of complex methods (especially from the areas of statistics, econometrics, optimization, operations research, simulation and machine learning), the use of statistical software (especially Matlab / Octave / Freemat, R, Stata, Python, SAS, Excel / VBA) and the transfer of research results to software tools that can be used in practice.
Marcus Glenn Walker
Academic PartnerMarcus Glenn Walker is a partner and co-CEO of Dragon Data Solutions, a German software firm that specializes in transportation solutions for cargo shipments by land, sea, and in the air. He is an expert in artificial intelligence (AI) and sustainability and has published with the ERIC team on several occasions in the past. He currently cooperates with the team on creating an AI solution that will increase the efficiency and thereby reduce the emissions of medium and long-haul truck shipments.
Gerrit Liedtke
Academic PartnerGerrit Liedtke is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bremen, Germany, and a research associate at the Emerging Risks Information Centre. His research interests include asset pricing, corporate finance, sustainable finance, and the replication crisis in finance, with an emphasis on complex quantitative methods drawn from statistics, machine learning, and natural language processing. He also has experience in adapting and advancing machine learning techniques to handle large financial datasets. In his work, he uses statistical software such as MATLAB, Python, and R. He has taught at the University of Bremen and holds regular programming workshops at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
Moein Karami
Research AssociateMoein Karami is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University. He obtained his doctoral degree from John Molson School of Business, in 2021. His PhD research was funded by several prestigious awards including the National Bank Initiative in Entrepreneurship and Family Business Fellowship. He also has served as the instructor of finance core undergraduate courses at Concordia University since 2016. His research interests include corporate finance, litigation, entrepreneurial finance, fintech, and behavioral finance.
Gabrielle Machnik-Kekesi
Research AssociateGabrielle Kathleen Machnik-Kekesi (she/elle/sí) is a Hardiman Research Scholar at the University of Galway (2021-2025). She holds an Individualized Program master’s degree from Concordia University, which was funded by both the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Fonds de recherche du Québec en Société et Culture, and a master’s in Information Studies from McGill University, which was supported by the Margery Trenholme Fellowship. Her research interests include women’s history, cultural geography, and food studies.
Victoria Kelly
Research AssociateVictoria Kelly holds a BSc in Biology with an additional major in Irish Studies and an MA in History. She is currently a PhD student in History, where her research investigates expressions of Canada's Eugenic movement in Central and Atlantic Canada. She has worked with the Emerging Risks Information Center at Concordia University since 2020, contributing to numerous book projects and research papers in the areas of sustainability, climate change, cybersecurity, and management. Victoria is currently involved in projects related to transit-oriented development and the building of sustainable urban centers.
Mehri Dehghani
Research AssociateMehri Dehghani is a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at Concordia University, Montreal, with over ten years of experience in financial operations in the insurance industry. Her research explores Corporate Finance, Financial Sustainability, and FinTech, using Natural Language Processing to assess financial risks. She works on projects analyzing how emerging risks affect financial performance. Proficient in Python, NLP, Stata and SAS, she connects financial analysis with technology and sustainability.
Hamidreza Adibi
Research AssociateHamidreza Adibi is a PhD candidate in Finance at Concordia University, specializing in the application of econometrics and machine learning to financial research. His work explores topics such as insider trading, corporate political activity, and monetary policy. He has extensive experience in data collection, cleaning, visualization, and analysis using Python, R, Stata, and SQL. In addition to his research, he teaches Fundamentals of Finance to undergraduate students as a part-time lecturer at Concordia. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and an MBA in Finance. Prior to his PhD studies, he worked as a data and business analyst at a major commercial bank, where he applied quantitative methods to support financial decision-making and risk analysis.
Soroosh Firoozabadi
Research AssociateSoroosh Firoozabadi is a Ph.D. student in Finance at the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University. His current research supports ERIC’s work on evaluating how climate-related disasters impact lending behavior, mortgage markets, and financial resilience. With a background in financial engineering and strong experience in data analysis and econometrics, he focuses on the intersection of climate finance, banking risk, and public policy. His work involves applying causal inference methods to large-scale datasets to better understand how environmental shocks influence financial systems. His research interests include sustainable finance, climate finance, and behavioral finance.
Rajesh Kumar Tharumar
Research AssistantRajesh is a M.Sc. student in the department of Finance at John Molson School of Business. He has 2+ years banking experience spanning credit analysis, monitoring and relationship management. His research interests include stability and sustainability of financial institutions, financial and corporate risk management and impact of disasters on the financial institutions.
Simone Donders
Research AssistantSimone Donders is an MA candidate in the Department of History at Concordia University, Montreal. Her research interests include Irish country house architecture and Napoleonic Era cavalry. She has a passion for sustainability studies and supports the team at the Emerging Risks Information Centre (ERIC) as both an editor and research associate.
Mauran Pavan
Research AssistantMauran holds a Bachelor of Computer Science (BCompSc) with a focus on Web Services & Applications from Concordia University. He has previous experience working at a start-up in the entertainment and tourism sector. His interests lie in FinTech, sustainability, and emerging new technologies.
Lily MacLean
Research AssistantLily MacLean is a Montreal-based multi-disciplinary artist who holds an interdisciplinary Master’s degree from Concordia University where she conducted an ethnographic study of the musical soundscape of Ireland’s Irish-speaking community of Na Déise, and the impact of sean-nós sing Nioclás Tóibín and the advent of recording technology on this region. She has been working with Concordia’s Emerging Risks Information Center since 2023 as a copyeditor. Her research interests include ethnomusicology, orality studies, oral history and media ecology. She is one of four members of the all-female Irish trad band Gráinne, which is in the process of producing their first album, to be released at the end of the summer. Her academic research into Irish-language song traditions plays a huge part in her musical career, and has been recognized by the Canadian Association of Irish Studies in 2024 where she received the Joseph McCann Memorial Award for her presentation.
Casey Jussaume
Research AssistantCasey Jussaume is a student completing his bachelor’s in commerce at Concordia University with an honor’s major in finance and a minor in financial reporting. As a Research Assistant for the Emerging Risks Information Center (ERIC), he applies automation and digital infrastructure to scale data collection and processing for research initiatives. As co-founder and Director of Research for the Quantitative Research and Competitions Club (QUARCC) – Québec’s premier quantitative finance student organization, he mentors aspiring researchers in data analysis, stochastic pricing models, and programming for quantitative applications. The research division focuses on global financial issues, algorithmic trading, and AI-assisted asset management.
Mengxiao Zhang
Research AssistantMengxiao Zhang holds a Bachelor of Commerce with a major in Finance from McGill University. She has been working with the Emerging Risks Information Centre (ERIC) team since 2023, supporting the group as both an editor and research associate. Her research interests include sustainability and emerging risk.
Mouin Mihoubi
Research AssistantMouin Mihoubi is an Honours Finance graduate from Concordia University and an incoming MSc student in Applied Financial Economics at HEC Montréal. His thesis explored whether acquiring firms benefit financially from targeting companies with stronger sustainability practices. He has also conducted research on systems thinking. His interests include sustainability, macroeconomics, and systemic problem-solving.
Alumni - Academic Partners
Mohammad Bitar
PhD degree in finance from Grenoble Alps University in France.
Alumni - Research associates
Anup Basnet
Ph.D. in Finance from John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
Chunrong Wang
Ph.D. in Finance from John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
Kalima Vico
Bachelor of Commerce in finance with a concentration in economics at Concordia.
Yunfei Zhao
Doctoral in finance at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University.
Eimear Rosato
PhD in the Department of History and School of Irish Studies at Concordia University.
Meaghan Landrigan-Buttle
Master’s degree in History from Concordia University (Montreal), with a focus in Irish Studies.
Alumni - Research assistants
Tyler Schwartz
MSc degree in Data Science and Business Analytics from HEC Montreal.
Adèle Dumont-Bergeron
Bachelor of Arts Honours in English and Creative Writing, with a Minor in Professional Writing.
Qi Wang
M.Sc. in Finance from the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, with a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science.
Brenda Odria Loayza
BA Honours in English Literature with a Minor in Professional Writing from Concordia University.
Maya Michaeli
Bachelor of Commerce in Finance from Concordia University and Master's in Finance student at FIU.
Pedram Fardnia
Ph.D. degree at Concordia University in the field of finance.
Luying Yang
Master of Science (MS) in Finance from Concordia University.
Yuhui Liao
Master of Science (MS) in Finance from Concordia University.
Elaheh Nikbakht
Master of Science (MS) in Finance from Concordia University.
Miles Murphy
Post-graduate student in Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast and a graduate of Concordia University’s School of Irish Studies in Montreal.
Akram Sadati
MSc in Finance from Concordia University, with undergraduate and graduate degrees in Financial Management from the School of Economic Sciences in Iran.