Academic Leads
Leading Academics & Industry Professionals
GWI Scholars learn the core tenets of finance and investing from leading academics and industry professionals through four weeks of rigorous study at one of three universities, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of California, Los Angeles. The academic program of lectures, hands-on technical training, industry panels, keynote speakers and field trips, culminates in a group capstone valuation project.
Curriculum Development
Co-developed with lead professors, our curriculum equips our scholars with the financial, technical and soft business skills to excel during their six-week paid investment internships. Lead instructors include professors of finance and private equity at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, professors of financial management and personal finance at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza School of Business, and professors of finance and real estate at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
BILGE YILMAZ, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Bilge Yilmaz is the Wharton Private Equity Professor and a professor of finance at The Wharton School. Prior to his current appointment, he was a faculty member at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He received his first degrees in electrical engineering and physics from Bogaziçi University and his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.
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Professor Yilmaz’s research focuses on corporate finance, alternative investments, and political economy. Recently, he has written on corporate governance, credit rating agencies, hedge funds, private equity, security design, short-selling constraints, corporate bankruptcy, and banks’ internal risk models. His earlier articles appeared in leading academic journals including the top three in the field: Econometrica, American Economic Review, and Journal of Political Economy.
Professor Yilmaz has designed a number of courses in corporate finance, shareholder activism and alternative investments, such as hedge funds and venture capital. He currently teaches courses on mergers and acquisitions, private equity, corporate bankruptcy, and European financial markets. He also leads The Wharton School’s Joshua J. Harris Alternative Investments Program and Wharton Executive Education Programs on Private Equity, Venture Capital and Corporate Bankruptcy and Distressed Investment.
BURCU ESMER, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Burcu Esmer is a research fellow at Wharton’s Alternative Investments Initiative and a lecturer at The Wharton School. Previously, she was a faculty member at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, and at Bilkent University in Turkey. She received her Ph.D. in finance and master’s in economics from the University of Iowa.
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Esmer’s research interests are in empirical corporate finance and alternative investments. Her most recent research focuses on agency conflicts in financial contracts, mergers and acquisitions, and private equity investments.
Her articles have appeared in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Banking and Finance. Esmer has presented her work to different audiences at various conferences and workshops, and she frequently serves as a reviewer for academic journals and conferences.
She is a member of the American Finance Association, Financial Management Association, Midwest Finance Association, Eastern Finance Association, European Finance Association, and the European Financial Management Association.
CARL ACKERMANN, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
Carl Ackermann teaches financial management and personal finance to University of Notre Dame undergraduates. He crusades against excessive fees in the investment industry, redirecting them to fight poverty and despair.
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Ackermann has had the good fortune of receiving several awards for his teaching and service. He has received over a dozen major teaching awards, and in 2012 was named one of the ten favorite business professors nationwide. Despite teaching a sophomore class, he is a multiple-time recipient of the Senior Class Fellow Award for the member of the Notre Dame community who has made the most positive and lasting impression on the senior class.
In 2016, he received the University’s Grenville Clark Award, for the faculty member or administrator whose voluntary activities have advanced the causes of peace and human rights. Ackermann is active in several university service projects and mentoring programs, and participates in football and basketball recruiting.
He holds an A.B. from Amherst College, and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
BARNEY HARTMAN-GLASER, UCLA ANDERSON SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
Barney Hartman-Glaser began his teaching career as an assistant professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, teaching real estate finance and core corporate finance, before joining UCLA Anderson as assistant professor of finance in 2013.
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A native Californian who hails from a family of academics, Hartman-Glaser was influenced early on to pursue a career in academia. He credits his father — a sociology professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and a real estate finance practitioner — with his current interest in real estate finance, admitting that he “learned how to use a spreadsheet before I could read.” He is also the director of research at the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate, with responsibility for allocating grants for research in the areas of real estate and urban economics.
Hartman-Glaser’s research applies contract and game theory to financial and real estate markets. He has conducted research on the consequences of private information in mortgage markets in which he showed that mortgage-backed securities issuers may cash in on their reputations by selling low-quality assets. He has also written on the incentives of mortgage originators to screen for good borrowers. He showed that requiring originators to retain an equity “tranche” is the most effective way to encourage good behavior.
One of Hartman-Glaser’s current projects focuses on how the development of quantitative easing can make it more difficult for low-credit quality buyers to obtain mortgages. A second paper takes a deep look at the declining share of profits that workers at large firms are receiving compared with those given to shareholders.
When not teaching or conducting research, look for Hartman-Glaser in any of Southern California’s outdoor playgrounds, where he could be surfing, cycling or backcountry skiing.
LORI SANTIKIAN, UCLA ANDERSON SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
Lori Santikian is an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Finance and Strategy areas and the Faculty Director of the Fink Center for Finance at UCLA Anderson School of Management. She holds a B.A. in Economics and Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.
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Prior to joining Anderson, she was an Assistant Professor of Finance and Business Economics at the USC Marshall School of Business. Her research is in the areas of financial intermediation, empirical corporate finance, and organizational economics, and has been published in the Journal of Financial Intermediation.
At Anderson, Professor Santikian has won the Citibank Teaching Award, the MBA Teaching Excellence Award, and the Fully Employed MBA Teaching Excellence Award. She teaches core business strategy and electives in valuation and data Analysis. She also teaches corporate finance at UCLA School of Law.