Chitru S Fernando

PhD (Pennsylvania). Professor Chitru Fernando is the Rainbolt Chair in Finance, Professor of Finance, Director of the Division of Finance and Director of the Center for Financial Studies. He is also a Research Fellow at the Wharton School’s Financial Institutions Center. He was the Founding Director of the Price College Energy Institute and subsequently served as the Energy Institute’s Research Director. He has held faculty appointments at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, SMU’s Cox School of Business, and Tulane University’s A.B. Freeman School of Business where he received the MBA Teacher of the Year award. He has also served on the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business Program for Executives, as a Senior Fellow at the Wharton School’s Risk and Decision Processes Center, and as a consultant to the World Bank. He has lectured on corporate and international finance, corporate risk management, and energy finance topics to executives in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Professor Fernando has been cited for his teaching in three Business Week surveys of business schools. He has 15 external research grants and 46 research publications to his credit, including articles in major refereed journals such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Journal of Financial Markets, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Financial Management. He is the winner of the 2015 University of Oklahoma Research Impact Award and a three-time winner of the Price College Dean's Distinguished Research Paper Award. He has served as a consultant and litigation expert to several major institutions and corporations worldwide, including the World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Government agencies in Russia, Egypt, and Sri Lanka, the Rockefeller Foundation, National Grid, Exelon, PacifiCorp, and FPL Energy on a variety of risk management, contracting, pricing, valuation and regulatory issues. Dr. Fernando received the Ph.D. in Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; M.A. in Applied Economics from the University of Pennsylvania; M.S. in Management from the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; M.S. in Technology and Policy from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and the B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering with First Class Honors from the University of Sri Lanka.