Robert W. Purcell Professorship of Management
Ph.D. in Finance, Northwestern University
Maureen O'Hara is the Robert W. Purcell Professor of Finance at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, and she also holds a professorship at the University of Technology Sydney. She holds degrees from the University of Illinois (BS economics) and Northwestern University (MS economics and PhD finance), as well as honorary doctorates from Facultés Universitaires Catholiques à Mons (FUCAM), Belgium, Universität Bern, Switzerland, and University College Dublin.
Professor O'Hara's research focuses on issues in market microstructure, and she is the author of numerous journal articles, as well as the classic book, Market Microstructure Theory (Blackwell: 1995). Recent research looks at the how ETFs affect market stability, liquidity issues in corporate bond markets, and transaction costs in bitcoin. Dr. O'Hara also publishes widely on a broad range of topics, including banking and financial intermediaries, law and finance, experimental economics, and finance and ethics (her book "Something for Nothing: Arbitrage and Ethics on Wall Street" was recently published; Norton:2016). Professor O'Hara has served as president of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, the Financial Management Association, the Society for Financial Studies, and the International Atlantic Economic Society. She was the executive editor of the
Review of Financial Studies, and co-editor of the
Review of Asset Pricing Studies.
Professor O'Hara serves on the Board of Trustees of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA). She spent more than a decade on the board of directors of Investment Technology Group, Inc. (ITG), a global agency brokerage firm, most recently serving as chairman of the board. She also served on the board of directors of New Star Financial, a commercial finance company recently sold to First Eagle. She is currently an advisor to Symbiont IO, a fintech company focused on distributed ledger technology. She was a member of the CFTC-SEC Emerging Regulatory Issues Task Force (the "flash crash" committee), the global advisory board of the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI), and the advisory board of the Office of Financial Research, U.S. Treasury. Most recently she served on the SEC Equity Market Structure Advisory Board.
She has consulted for a number of companies and organizations, including Facebook, Microsoft, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, the New York Stock Exchange, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, and the World Federation of Exchanges.
I think the core value of any program that Cornell was involved in is
we are really trying to create business leaders
who are going to bring not only the technical skills that you are gonna need in the future.
But we need the skills to understand what motivates people:
How do you lead?
How do you work in groups?
How do you get the best out of yourself?
and how do you get the best out of your colleagues?
This is a great opportunity.
They come here excited to learn.
They come here ready to learn and become a new people,
and I've just seen that time and time and time again.
Every woman who is coming out of our Tsinghua-Cornell program is a star and they are a leader.
And we're preparing you to do that.
So if we prepare you to do that
and you just sit there,
then you’ve wasted your time.
So that's my hope that
the women who were preparing in this program or thinking about this program
that's what they want too,
they want to be the stars and leaders that we are preparing them to be.
