Faculty

Alexander Arapoglou teaches risk management and applied investment management to MBA students at UNC Kenan-Flagler.

He is principal of Aland Corporation, a derivatives and risk consulting firm that he founded in Durham, N.C., in 2002.

He has been a derivatives trader and head of risk management worldwide for a major New York bank. Professor Arapoglou served as treasurer and head of risk management worldwide for Mizuho Capital Markets Corporation. As treasurer, he was responsible for firm investments, funding, liquidity risk management as well as all non-trading foreign exchange and interest rate risk. As head of risk management, he managed the market risk department and implemented a variety of metrics and techniques for the analysis of trading, credit and liquidity risk.

Before joining Mizuho, Professor Arapoglou traded yen derivatives for Chemical Bank and for Chase after the two banks merged. He joined Chemical Bank as global head of risk management in 1989, and managed risk incidents in the United States, Europe, Asia and South America.

His career included positions as head of the financial analysis group at Salomon Brothers and head of consumer sector treasury at Chase, where he was on the bank-wide treasury strategy committee. Before he began his financial career, Professor Arapoglou was a management consultant with Accenture, specializing in evaluating and recommending strategic improvements to controls and management information systems for large capital projects worldwide including nuclear power plants refineries and LNG plants.

Professor Arapoglou received his MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler and his bachelor’s degree in engineering from McGill University.

Art Baker teaches courses on private equity, financial tools, mergers and acquisitions and entrepreneurship through acquisition. He is a faculty advisor to a student-run private equity fund.

He brings more than 15 years of professional finance experience to UNC Kenan-Flagler. He worked as an investment banker and finance executive in Fortune 500 and mid-sized companies.

Dr. Baker served as chief strategy officer for Smart Start, a portfolio company of a major private equity firm. He led strategy, business development and M&A activities. He was a member of the senior executive committee reporting to the CEO.

He also was manager of strategic initiatives for AAA; manager of corporate development for General Motors; and vice president of investment banking and M&A for RBC Capital Markets in Toronto.

Dr. Baker previously taught at Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University and the Investment Banking Institute.

He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder.

He received his PhD in economics from Moscow State University, his MBA from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and his BS in business from Oklahoma City University.

Capital structure, information economics and liquidity are the research interests of Jesse Davis. His recent work focuses on the dynamics of an entrepreneur’s decisions regarding the types of securities issued to finance the firm.

Before he began his academic career, he was vice president of quantitative fixed income research at Neuberger Berman in Chicago, and at Princeton Review in different roles.

He was a development project coordinator for Connections for the Homeless and director of resource development for AmericaCorps/Sacramento Habitat for Humanity.

Dr. Davis received his PhD from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, his MBA with high honors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and his BS in mathematics and BA in chemistry and English literature from Miami University.

Eric Ghysels holds the inaugural Edward M. Bernstein Distinguished Professorship of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a Professor of Finance at the Kenan-Flagler Business School. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. He has been a visiting professor or scholar at several major U.S., European and Asian universities. He served on the editorial boards of several academic journals and was co-editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics and editor of the Journal of Financial Econometrics. He has published in the leading economics, finance and statistics journals and has published several books. He is also the Founding Co-President of the Society for Financial Econometrics (SoFiE). He was a Resident Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during the 2008-2009 financial crisis and a Duisenberg Fellow at the European Central Bank in 2011 during the sovereign debt crisis. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the Journal of Econometrics, Fellow of the Society for Financial Econometrics and holds a Honorary Doctorate from HEC Liege. He is currently co-editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics and Faculty Research Director of the Rethinc.Labs at the Kenan Institute.

His most recent research focuses on MIDAS (meaning Mi(xed) Da(ta) S(ampling)) regression models and related econometric methods, machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data, FinTech, and quantum computing applications in finance.

Mustafa N. Gültekin’s work focuses on investments, portfolio theory, asset pricing models, financial modeling, valuation, and risk management.

He taught applied investment management, financial modeling, valuation and corporate restructuring, and financial markets. Other areas of expertise include international finance, mortgage backed securities, and asset-liability management.

Dr. Gültekin is currently the Senior Advisor to Yilmaz Advisory LLC., an advisory firm for financial legal cases. He has formerly served as a consultant to major corporations in the United States and abroad. He was a limited partner at the Blackethouse Group LLC, former partner and senior advisor to Morning Meeting Inc., a financial modeling and consulting group, and consulted with the Community First Investment Risk Evaluation (CFIRE) team of Community First Financial Group. He served on the boards of Belltower Advisors, LLC, a hedge fund, Clockworks Therapeutics Inc., a biotech company, and Ardic Tech, Inc., an ICT services and outsourcing company.

Dr. Gültekin is the former president of the European Financial Management Association and the former dean of the College of Administrative Sciences and Economics at Koç University in Istanbul. He also served as associate director of the Management Decision Laboratory at New York University and as a research scientist at Boğazici University in Turkey.

He received his PhD in finance from New York University, his MA in operations management from Boğazici University and a BS in physics from Middle East Technical University.

Jim Jones (MBA ’06), is Partner and Generalist Investor at William Blair Investment Management, with more than 20 years of experience in the institutional investment industry across analyst and portfolio manager roles. Directly after earning his MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler, Jim worked as an equity analyst in the Consumer and Materials sectors with Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. He joined William Blair in 2010 where he was a small-cap industrials analyst until 2019 and served as Director of Research from 2017-2019. Jim was a portfolio manager on the firm’s institutional SMID and mid-cap growth products from 2019-2023 before his current role. As an MBA student, Jim co-founded the Alpha Challenge stock pitch competition and has remained an active alumnus since that time, serving as Chair of the Investment Management Center, co-founder of IM for All: Women & Wealth and Professor of the Practice for the Fundamental Investment Practicum, which he created in 2015.

Pramita Saha, brings over 15 years of experience in capital markets, sales and trading and investment banking to her teaching and her role as executive director of the Center for Excellence in Investment Management. Her teaching focuses on experiential offerings. Before she joined UNC Kenan-Flagler she led loan syndicate and distribution Americas at Standard Chartered Bank and held positions at Goldman Sachs, Citi and BBVA. She received her MBA from Wharton. Learn more about our executive director here.

The research of Andreas Stathopoulos focuses on asset pricing and international finance, with an emphasis on exchange rate determination, international risk sharing and portfolio choice.

His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Financial Economics and the Review of Financial Studies.

Dr. Stathopoulos teaches courses in investments, financial markets and macroeconomics.

Before joining UNC Kenan-Flagler, he taught at the University of Southern California and the University of Washington.

He received his PhD in finance and economics from Columbia University, his M.Sc. in economics and finance from the University of Warwick and his undergraduate degree in finance from the University of Piraeus.

Ranjit Thomas has served as a faculty advisor to the Applied Investment Management (AIM) class since 2019. He is a portfolio manager at Spice Capital Advisors, an investment management firm in Raleigh. Prior to this, he was a Partner at Tracer Capital, a long short equities fund in New York. He has also worked at the private equity unit of Swiss Re and at the Boston Consulting Group in New York and Asia.

He graduated with an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He is a CFA charterholder and has served on the Board of the CFA Society of North Carolina.