M.S.Q.F. Advisory Board
Christopher Cohen
Christopher Cohen is a seasoned capital markets professional with more than 20 years of experience focusing on strategies related to establishing, operating, and integrating businesses across fixed income.
In 2015, Cohen joined the Royal Bank of Canada. He is the chief operating officer for the bank’s global interest rates sales and trading group and serves as COO for Fixed Income Canada. Cohen is responsible for developing strategy to grow market share in the United States and Europe and to build on the bank's success in the Canadian fixed-income market. Cohen is a member of the bank’s Canadian Fixed Income Operating Committee and chairs the Global Interest Rates Operating Committee. In addition, he oversees the development of capital-relief strategies to maximize ROE through the restructuring of legacy loan and derivative portfolios. Lastly, he serves as senior relationship manager to two of the firm’s top 20 institutional clients.
Previously, Cohen was with Morgan Stanley. He joined the firm in 1995 and held a range of positions within its fixed income division and the corporate treasury group. He spent time in Japan and Korea building out the firm’s special situations group, which focused on the acquisition of Asian distressed loans and hired local talent to evaluate and analyze distressed opportunities. Cohen established Morgan Stanley's first bank in the United States, MS Bank N.A., which provided a more cost-efficient funding model for the firm’s senior lending and warehouse lending programs. Cohen later served as the COO for North America's interest rates product group, where he was responsible for sales and trading strategy as well as the restructuring of the division's business model to adapt to the current regulatory capital environment. As COO, he managed the division's North America liquid flow rates and structured rates businesses, had ownership for managing the division’s global balance sheet, managed the division’s overall expense base, and worked closely with key clients on notable transactions. He also was the point of contact for the global rates business with the SEC, FED, and CME.
During his tenure at Morgan Stanley, Cohen advised key real money and hedge fund clients on cross-asset trading strategies. He originated industry-leading quantitative concept seminars that bridged advanced topics in fixed-income trading and portfolio management with Morgan Stanley’s key clients. In his role in Treasury capital markets, Cohen oversaw and managed the firm’s $140 billion unsecured debt liquidity portfolio. During the 2008 credit crisis, he was actively involved in the $9 billion Mitsubishi UFJ capital raise and was a key member of the Morgan Stanley team that advised the U.S. Treasury on terms related to TARP and the FDIC on the structure of the TLGP program.
Cohen has a B.A. in economics from Fordham University. He has developed curricular materials that are used at Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business in the M.S. in Quantitative Finance and other graduate business programs. He has lectured in Gabelli School courses, and he established a speaker series to connect high-profile members of the financial services industry with the Gabelli School faculty and student body.
Cohen has served as a mentor for the Department of Defense Fellowship Program, from which he received the 2014 DoD Fellowship Medal. He is a member of American Corporate Partners that provides mentoring to veterans seeking opportunities within the financial services industry.
Lourenco Miranda
Regional Head of Capital Management, Resolution (Risk), and Model Risk Management for the Americas, Société Genérale
Lourenco Miranda is the regional head of capital management, resolution (risk), and model risk management for the Americas at Société Genérale. He joined the bank in February 2016 as managing director, head of capital planning, assessment, and review (CCAR) in New York. Prior to that, during his 20 years of financial industry experience, Miranda held multiple leadership roles in risk management and finance at internationally active financial institutions in multiple regions and regulatory jurisdictions.
On the academic side, for the past 25 years, Miranda has held faculty positions in multiple academic centers worldwide in the field of financial mathematics, has been in the board of international professional institutions, and has been a regular speaker at major international risk conferences. Miranda is a published writer of books in risk and finance and an author of articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is also a reviewer of professional and academic journals in risk as well as a regular contributor/writer for the renowned Risk Magazine, the same magazine that nominated him for the Risk Manager of the Year Award in 2006 for implementing a risk-innovation program in an international European bank. He holds a Ph.D. in statistical physics applied to risk measurement.
David Moffitt
Managing Director and Head of Tactical Investment Opportunities, LibreMax Capital
David Moffitt is a managing director and head of tactical investment opportunities at LibreMax Capital. Prior to joining the firm, Moffitt was a managing director and partner at J.C. Flowers & Co, where he was responsible for the firm’s investments in fixed income as well as the head of J.C. Flowers asset management. Prior to Flowers, Moffitt was a founding member of Mead Park Asset Management LLC, where he was co-president of the firm’s CLO platform and responsible for structured-products investing.
Prior to Mead Park, Moffitt was a managing director at Morgan Stanley and global head of the firm’s securitization business and the bank and insurance-solutions business. While at Morgan Stanley, he served on the firm’s capital markets management committee.
Moffitt has held similar positions at MatlinPatterson Global Advisors (senior advisor), Merrill Lynch & Co. (head structured products distribution – Americas), RBS Greenwich Capital, and Credit Suisse.
Prior to banking, Moffitt practiced law with Brown Rudnick in Boston. He is a member of the Massachusetts, New York, and U.S. Supreme Court bars. He served a term as a special assistant attorney general in Massachusetts, where he worked on the global tobacco settlement. He is a graduate of Syracuse University College of Law (magna cum laude, Order of the Coif) and Binghamton University.
Michael Sternberg
Managing Director, RBC Capital Markets, Head of Quantitative Analytics, New York
Michael Sternberg recently joined RBC Capital Markets to head the global quant group in the global markets group working with sales and trading. Prior to this role, he was a managing director at Morgan Stanley, most recently in London, running risk analytics in the risk-management division. He ran many global front-office quant teams including fixed income, investment banking, wealth management, and XVA trading during his tenure at Morgan Stanley. Sternberg joined Morgan Stanley in 1995 to run MBS structuring from Prudential Securities, where he ran the financial strategies group and focused on mortgage-backed and asset-backed securitization.
Sternberg started in the industry at The First Boston Corporation in 1986 in the mortgage department. He holds a B.A. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley.
Sanjay Sharma, Ph.D.
Founder and Chairman, GreenPoint Global
Sanjay Sharma is the founder and chairman of GreenPoint Global, a risk advisory, education, publishing, technology, legal, and business-process outsourcing firm headquartered in New York. Founded in 2006, GreenPoint has grown to more than 380 employees with a global footprint and production and management teams located here in the United States, India, and Israel.
From 2007 to 2016, Sharma was the chief risk officer of the global arbitrage and trading group and managing director in fixed-income and currencies risk management at RBC Capital Markets in New York. His career in the financial-services industry spans more than two decades, during which he has held investment-banking and risk-management positions at Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Moody’s, and Natixis. In addition to publishing several papers, Sharma is the author of Risk Transparency (Risk Books, 2013), which provides a framework for enhancing risk transparency through quantitative parameters, subjective analyses, and contextual commentary. He is the lead co-author of a forthcoming book, The Fundamental Review of Trading Book (or FRTB): Impact and Implementation, to be published by Risk Books.
Sharma was the founding director of the RBC/Hass Fellowship Program at the University of California at Berkeley and is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Tandon School MS-FE program, Fordham University’s MSQF program, and EDHEC’s MS in Financial Markets program in Nice, France. Sharma has served as an advisor and a member of the board of directors of UPS Capital, a division of UPS, and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and at universities. He serves on the global board of directors for the Professional Risk international Association.
Sharma holds a Ph.D. in finance and international business from New York University and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of Business, and has undergraduate degrees in physics and marine engineering. Sharma acquired his appreciation for risk firsthand as a merchant marine officer at sea, where he served for seven years and received the chief engineer’s certificate of competency for ocean-going merchant ships.
Georgiy Zhikharev
Managing Director and the Director of Investments and Research, J.P. Morgan Private Bank
Georgiy Zhikharev is a managing director and the director of investments and research at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, based in New York. His team is responsible for enhancing the investment process and coordinating investment research and technology efforts across the wealth-management investment-solutions platform, as well as fostering and overseeing a robust investment-governance framework for internal and external investment solutions. He is a member of the Private Bank’s global investment committee, as well as the investment review committee and investment performance governance committee, responsible for the onboarding and evaluation of investment vehicles.
Prior to his current role, Zhikharev was the global head of portfolio construction with responsibilities for multi-asset class solutions across the risk spectrum; was the global head of quantitative research and analytics for the global markets strategy team; spent five years as the portfolio manager for the global access hedge fund portfolios; and was the risk officer for the global access team, overseeing quantitative-risk analytics and research and evaluating the risk impact of portfolio trades.
Prior to his role on the global access team, he helped to develop the non-discretionary risk-management unit of the Private Bank. Before joining J.P. Morgan, Zhikharev was director and partner at Dialogue Investments, an investment-management and consulting company in Russia, responsible for proprietary portfolio investments and investment-management advisory business.
Zhikharev holds a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in finance from DePaul University in Chicago. He also holds a PhD-equivalent degree in economics from the Kazan State University, Russia, and a financial risk manager (FRM) designation from the Global Association of Risk Professionals. He teaches graduate-level courses at the Gabelli School of Business.