RL Shankar

Lakshmi Shankar Ramachandran (aka R. L. Shankar), PhD, assistant professor of banking and finance, joined Weatherhead School of Management in 2018. He earned his PhD in Finance from EdHEC, MS in Computational Finance from Carnegie Mellon University, and Bachelors of Technology from IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), Madras.

Dr. Shankar‘s primary research interest lies in the area of empirical asset pricing. His papers have appeared, among other journals, in the Journal of Financial Economics (JFE). His research work focuses on the pricing of contingent claims in imperfect markets, market microstructure, and algorithmic trading. He has received several prestigious research grants, including the inaugural grant for capital markets instituted by New York University and the National Stock Exchange of India.

Shankar teaches graduate-level courses on Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain Technology, FinTech, Quantitative Risk Modeling, and Corporate Risk Management. Over the past ten years, he also has established himself as a successful knowledge partner for leading enterprises. To date, he has trained over a thousand executives; his clientele includes Bank of America, Standard Chartered Bank, Barclays, World Bank, IHS Markit, and other leading businesses.

Shankar received the Weatherhead Graduate Faculty Teaching Excellence Award for 2020. In its citation for the "40-under-40 inspiring educators" award, a newspaper in India referred to Shankar as "The Professional Simplifier" due to his talent for keeping lessons simple, straightforward, and engaging.

A highly articulate speaker with a passion for knowledge dissemination, Dr. Shankar has been both a keynote and an invited speaker at several leading international seminars and conferences. In his well-received TEDx talk on Algorithmic Trading, Shankar vividly explained how algorithms have taken over trading in global financial markets.

Initially Appointed: 2018