Women in Finance

Midhat Syed is an investment manager at Herfo Finans. She manages the public markets portfolio, which invests in listed equities, bonds and UCITS funds. Prior to joining Herfo, Midhat held various analytical and portfolio management roles in SKAGEN Funds for over 12 years, and GIB in London for three years. Midhat is a CFA and CIPM charterholder, has a BSc in economics, econometrics and finance from University of York, and an MSc in economics and finance from Warwick Business School. 

Grethe Safar Meisingset is Partner & Head of Sustainability at HitecVision, a leading provider of institutional capital to Europe’s energy industry working to invest in companies that help reduce the overall carbon footprint of the world’s energy supply. She joined HitecVision in 2022, from the position as Senior Vice President Strategy & Business Development at TOMRA Collection, the world leader in reverse vending and one of the earliest companies promoting the circular economy. Previously, she spent six years in transaction advisory roles with PwC in Norway and New Zealand. Her latest position being Senior Manager at PwC Deals Oslo, where she was a member of the Corporate Finance team, leading M&A processes across a wide range of industries. Grethe holds an MSc in Economics and Business Administration from the Norwegian School of Economics. 

Siv Christensen is the CFO of DSD, which is a combined family office for investments, a shipping company with oil tankers, and the owner of the bus company Tide. In 2023, DSD had a turnover of 6,2 bln NOK and 5 642 employees. Prior to joining DSD in 2021, Siv has had a 25+ year career mainly with energy and industrial firms, working for Norske Shell, Equinor, Kverneland and Orkla, as well as a brief stint as a management consultant in London.  She has spent most of her career in transactions (mergers, acquisitions and divestments), commercial negotiations and finance. 

Nadya Malenko is a professor of finance at Boston College. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and a research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute. Her research interests are in the areas of corporate finance, corporate governance, private equity, and organizational economics. Her work has appeared in top academic journals and has received several awards. Professor Malenko's research has been featured in media outlets including the The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, and Financial Times. She is an associate editor at the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and she serves on the board of directors of the American Finance Association, Western Finance Association, and European Finance Association. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. 

Elena Asparouhova is the Stena Faculty Chair of Finance at the David Eccles School of Business. She received her doctorate degree in Social Sciences from the California Institute of Technology and her Masters in Statistics from Sofia University, Bulgaria. Prof. Asparouhova's research interests are in theoretical and experimental financial economics. They include but are not confined to the theory of asset pricing, experimental finance, general equilibrium theory, and econometrics. Her recent work has been centered on the effects of competition in financial markets under delegation and under asymmetric information, information percolation in dark markets, the role of perfect forecast in multi period markets, and market equilibration. She is also involved in experimental research on the interaction of humans and robots in financial markets. She is the editor of the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance. Her papers have received best paper awards at the Journal of Financial Markets and the Review of Finance.  

Michaela Pagel is an Associate Professor at Olin Business School, Washington University of St. Louis. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and works on topics in behavioral economics and household finance.  Her current work analyzes transaction-level data on income, spending, balances, credit limits, and logins stemming from a financial aggregation app. Furthermore, she is working with bank account data linked to individual investors security trades and portfolios. She is a Research Network Affiliate at the Center for Economic Studies. She is an associate editor at the Journal of Banking and Finance, and Journal of Corporate Finance

Professor Orly Sade is the Albertson-Waltuch Chair in Business Administration and an Associate Professor of Finance at the Department of Finance, School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a board member at “Clal Insurance” and was a member of the advisory board of the Ministry of Finance’s capital market division, and served on the board of directors of the Securities Authority. She advised financial institutions and companies in finance, debt offerings and tenders.  

Debrah Meloso is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Toulouse Business School. She has a Ph.D. from Caltech. Her research has been published in journals like Science, Management Science, International Journal of Game Theory, and Applied Economics. Prof. Meloso is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance.