THE ROBERT T. LECLAIR FINANCE DEPARTMENT SEMINAR SERIES

The Robert T. LeClair Finance Department Seminar Series extends the curriculum by inviting leading scholars to speak with VSB students on leading issues within the finance industry. Past topics have included responsible investing and investment decision-making; the costs and benefits of Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) for university endowments; and the pitfalls of central clearing in the derivatives markets. 

FALL 2026 SEMINAR SERIES

Seminars are held on Fridays at 1:45 p.m. in Bartley 2010.

PRESENTER BIOGRAPHIES

Rawley Heimer is an Associate Professor of Finance at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. His research centers on individuals' lifelong financial security and the decisions they make in risky asset markets and conventional debt markets, spanning household finance, behavioral finance, consumer credit, retail trading, real estate, and financial institutions. His work connecting social media to trading behavior and inaccurate beliefs to life-cycle financial decisions has been published in leading finance and economics journals and has received the Dimensional Fund Advisors Distinguished Paper Award at the Journal of Finance and the Rising Scholar Award at the Review of Financial Studies. It has been featured in the Financial Times, Forbes, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. 

Professor Heimer serves as an Associate Editor at Management Science, the Review of Corporate Financial Studies, and Financial Management. Before joining ASU, he was an Assistant Professor of Finance at Boston College, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and Senior Advisor for Research and Policy at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He holds a Ph.D. from Brandeis University and a bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester. 

Pankaj K. Jain is Professor and Chair of the Department of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate at the Fogelman College of Business and Economics, University of Memphis, and is currently a Visiting Professor of Finance at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on financial market design, market microstructure, trading systems, and financial regulation, and has been published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Management Science, and Contemporary Accounting Research, among others. He serves as an Associate Editor of the Financial Review and is a frequent presenter and discussant at meetings of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

Professor Jain has extensive policy experience: he served as a visiting academic scholar at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (2012–2014), conducting studies mandated by Congress, and as a Research Principal at the U.S. Treasury's Office of Financial Research (2017–2019). He is a CFA charter holder and has served as President of the CFA Society of Memphis. He earned his Ph.D. in Finance from Indiana University. 

Matthew Ringgenberg is a Professor of Finance at the University of Utah. His research focuses on the role of institutional investors in financial markets. Specifically, he has examined how the actions of short-sellers, hedge funds, mutual funds, and exchange traded funds interact with various frictions to affect real economic activity and the formation of asset prices. His research has been published in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies and has been cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Economist, and The New Yorker. His paper “Reusing Natural Experiments” won a Brattle Group Distinguished Paper prize at the Journal of Finance. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. 

Prior to joining the University of Utah, he was an Assistant Professor of Finance at Washington University in St. Louis and before his academic career, he worked as a consultant for Charles River Associates in Chicago. He earned a bachelor's degree in Finance and Economics from the University of Wisconsin in 2003, a M.S. in Economics from the University of North Carolina in 2009, and a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of North Carolina in 2011. 

Murillo Campello is the Joseph Cordell Eminent Scholar in Finance at the University of Florida. He is the Managing Editor of The Journal of Financial Intermediation. A former chaired professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, he is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Director of Research at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, and a Distinguished Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. 

Professor Campello is an internationally recognized scholar of Financial Economics. Campello's papers have been cited by prominent policy authorities, such as the Federal Reserve chairman, mentioned in Congressional hearings, described in the “Economic Report of the President,” and used to advise the U.S. Supreme Court. His work on the Financial Crisis, Brexit, and Covid-19 has been widely featured in the Financial Times, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal. He earned his PhD in Finance from the University of Illinois, an MS in Business Administration from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and a BS in Economics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.