Invited Speakers
Keynote Speaker
Mohammad Kabir Hassan
University of New Orleans, United States
Professor Dr. Mohammad Kabir Hassan is Professor of Finance in the Department of Economics and Finance in the University of New Orleans. He currently holds three endowed Chairs-Hibernia Professor of Economics and Finance, Hancock Whitney Chair Professor in Business, and Bank One Professor in Business- in the University of New Orleans. Professor Hassan is the winner of the 2016 Islamic Development Bank (IDB) Prize in Islamic Banking and Finance. Professor Hassan received his BA in Economics and Mathematics from Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota, USA, and M.A. in Economics and Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA respectively.
Plenary Speaker 1
Ferdinand Gul
Deakin University, Australia
Ferdinand Gul is the Alfred Deakin Professor of Accounting and Finance in Deakin Business School, Deakin University. Ferdinand was a former Professor and Head of the Accounting and Finance Discipline in the School of Business at Monash University in Malaysia. He was also the Donald Cochrane Chair of Business and Economics at Monash University. Ferdinand has a wide practical and academic experience, having held several senior positions in various universities in Australia and Hong Kong. He has provided consulting services on corporate governance reform to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government and held various visiting or honorary professorships in universities in China such as Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Zhongshan University and Xiamen University. Ferdinand has supervised more than 30 PhD students and published in top-tier journals such as the Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review and The Journal of Financial Economics. He is the Co-Editor in Chief for Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics.
Plenary Speaker 2
Jonathan A. Batten
RMIT University, Australia
Jonathan A. Batten is Professor of Finance at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, an Honorary Professor in the Discipline of Finance at the University of Sydney Business School, Australia and an Honorary Chair Professor at the East China University of Science & Technology, Shanghai, China. Prior to these positions he worked as a Professor in Finance at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, Monash University, Australia, Seoul National University, Korea, and University Utara Malaysia. He is the managing editor of the Journal of International Financial Markets Institutions and Money, co-editor of Finance Research Letters, and senior editor of Elsevier’s highly ranked Emerging Markets Review. Prior to working in academia, he held senior treasury and risk management consulting positions with several institutions including Bank of Tokyo, Credit Lyonnais, IBM Consulting and Reuters Ltd.
Plenary Speaker 3
Sofia Johan
Florida Atlantic University, United States
Sofia Johan is assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University. She earned her first degree in Law from the University of Liverpool and her LLM in International Economic Law from the University of Warwick. After working for several years in the financial markets, she returned to academia and earned her PhD in Law and Economics from Tilburg University in The Netherlands. Her areas of expertise and research interest include legal and ethical issues in financial markets, entrepreneurial finance, and regulation of financial markets around the world. Her research has appeared in such leading journals as Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Oxford Review of Economics. She is co-editor of Venture Capital: An International Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance and an Associate Editor of the British Journal of Management.