How I Became a Quant - Washington DC

Panelist Biographies

Dr. Aurèle Houngbedji, Bio Coming Soon

Richard Schwinn, is an economist and mathematician. He serves as a senior financial analyst at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where he creates algorithms for detecting anomalies in market data and applies NLP in the rule-making process. Prior to the SEC, he worked as a research economist at the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, where he co-authored a widely cited paper on small business GDP. He taught graduate and undergraduate courses for more than a decade at universities including Loyola University Chicago. He has an MS in Mathematics and a PhD in Economics from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Ryan Henning, is the Head of Financial Engineering at Freddie Mac, a position he has held for most of his 22 year career. In this role he oversees the implementation of the firm's models and risk systems, as well as model governance for a $3.4T balance sheet that helps provide stability and liquidity for our nation's housing stock. Models and systems produced by Financial Engineering include automated underwriting, distressed borrower and property decisions, capital markets trading, debt issuance and redemption, market and credit risk management, home valuation, credit risk transfer, hedge accounting, loan loss reserves, regulatory capital, stress testing, balance sheet forecasting, and corporate strategy. Ryan has degrees in Computer Science, Finance and Accounting from St. Bonaventure University, and a Masters in Computational Finance from Carnegie Mellon University. He also holds CFA and FRM designations.

Suzan Isazadeh, is the director of Modeling and Analytics at Fannie Mae’s Multifamily Division (MF). She has more than 10 years of experience in the Mortgage Industry specialized in Residential and Multifamily Real Estate Mortgages. She joined Fannie Mae in late 2009 after graduating from George Washington University. While at Fannie Mae, Suzan covered modeling and analytics for both Single-Family & Multifamily divisions where she initially managed model vetting processes to ensure smooth producionalization of new/updated credit/Loss models. She specialized in developing credit pricing and risk assessment framework for the execution of MF Credit Risk Transfer Transactions and building innovative Machine Learning/ BI tools for front-end business. She currently manages a team of Data Scientists and a Capital Market Advisor, responsible for developing Machine Leaning models to improve/automate Credit Underwriting processes and building analytics tools and models for Capital Markets Trading desk. She holds a Masters’ degree in Finance from George Washington University and an MBA from Sharif University in Tehran. She also has a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Tehran Polytechnic University.