Venture Capital (Mr. Chris P. Lee)
Chris is currently an assistant professor of Operations and Information Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Chris served in analyst and VP roles at CIBC and WellNet Inc. He has been nominated and awarded by the Institute for Management Science and Operations Research three times, and his research accomplishments were recently reported by TIME and Forbes magazines. Chris has consulted for many large enterprises including, most recently, the $200 million Roberts Proton Center, the largest proton cancer radiation therapy center in the world. At present, he also serves on the board of a stealth-mode technology startup in Silicon Valley. Chris graduated from Stanford University where he was awarded master and doctoral degrees in computational engineering.
Private Equity (Mr. Stephen M. Sammut)
Mr. Sammut is Senior Fellow, Wharton Health Care Systems and Entrepreneurship, and Venture Partner, Burrill & Company, a San Francisco based life science merchant bank.
His role at Burrill & Company is the development and management of health and life science venture funds in Asia, the Middle East/North Africa, and Latin America
At the Wharton School he teaches venture capital management, corporate development, mergers and acquisitions, biotechnology entrepreneurship, intellectual property strategy, and private equity in emerging markets, and a special seminar on private sector participation in international health.
Mr. Sammut previously held the positions of Vice President of Development of Teleflex Incorporated where he created and managed acquisitions and alliances, and Vice President of S.R One, Ltd., GlaxoSmithKline’s venture capital fund.
Mr. Sammut has been involved in the creation or funding of nearly 40 biotechnology, Internet, and information technology companies globally. He is on numerous Boards of Directors and Advisory Boards of major corporations, international VC and PE funds, venture capital-backed companies, multilateral banks and NGOs.
Real Estate (Ms. Grace Wong)
Grace Wong is an Assistant Professor in the Real Estate Department at the Wharton School. Her research centers on the way housing markets respond to exogenous shocks. She has written on the impact of the 2003 SARS epidemic on the housing market and the role of media and politics in speculative housing bubbles. Her current research include the microeconomics of housing bubbles, the impact of environmental improvements on housing prices, the relationship between housing prices and extreme events and housing design and health. She received her PhD from Princeton University, and her and BSc from the London School of Economics.
Her representative publications include:
“Has Sars Infected the Housing Market? Evidence from Hong Kong .”
“Is Sars a Poor Man's Disease? Housing Values, Living Conditions and Health.”
“The Anatomy of the Hong Kong Property Bubble.”
“Green City Strategies, Home Values and Social Capital.” (with S. Wachter)
Investment Management (Mr. Alex Edmans)
Alex Edmans is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Wharton. After graduating from Oxford University, Professor Edmans worked as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley in London. He then earned a PhD in Financial Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. During his studies, he spent his first summer as an Associate in Morgan Stanley’s Fixed Income Division in New York.
Alex joined Wharton in 2007 and won the MBA Core Teaching Award and the MBA Core Curriculum Award in his debut year. Alex’s research interests are in corporate finance and investments. His study on the link between employee satisfaction and shareholder returns won the 2007 Moskowitz Prize for Socially Responsible Investing research. A paper on the effect of international soccer results on investor sentiment and stock returns was a finalist for the Smith-Breeden Prize for best paper in the Journal of Finance and covered by the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, ESPN, CNBC and the BBC. His paper on corporate governance via “voting with your feet” is forthcoming in the Journal of Finance, and a theory showing that executive compensation may be more efficient than commonly believed is forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies.
Investment Banking (Mr. Rahul Kapoor)
Professor Kapoor holds a Ph.D. and an M.Sc. in Management from INSEAD. His research examines how firms manage coordination and technological challenges in their value chains and how these challenges impact a firm’s competitive advantage. His research has appeared in prominent management journals such as the Academy of Management Journal and the Academy of Management Proceedings. He teaches the core MBA course in Competitive Strategy at Wharton. Prior to joining academia, Professor Kapoor spent over 7 years in the high-tech industry where he worked for Texas Instruments and was involved with two startups holding executive positions in new business development, client management, marketing and R&D.
