My Interests
Financial Engineering
I’m primarily interested in securitization methods to improve biomedical research. As a result, I admire Andrew Lo, a professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and read often on the explanations of markets and their applications to other parts of the world. I enjoy reading research papers from Finance PhDs like Damodaran, Pesendorfer, and Lo because I think breakthroughs coming in the next years will come as a result of improvements in incentive structures. I would like to be able to use my MIS degree to implement quadratic programs used in Markowitz’s seminal paper, Portfolio Selection, in order to solve increasingly more complex problems in the financial industry.
Poker & Blackjack
I love games of strategy based around probability. With blackjack or poker, while there is typically a correct way to play a hand, other factors, such as the numbers of decks in the shoe, the number of 2-6s in the shoe left, and the initial card turned over, affect playing deviations. In poker, the proper strategy, based around pot odds, can be influenced by the reads one has on his or her opponents. I find individuals deviating from perfect basic strategy both interesting and confusing. Rather than taking the view that all individuals act rationally, I would like to model human behavior as normal rather than rational and apply it to the markets.
Oncology
Prior to college, I had originally intended on becoming an oncologist, a doctor that deals with the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. As I began learning more about the field, I found extremely outdated technologies and languages being implemented in cancer centers around the world. I initially chose the MIS major to learn tools to improve Health IT, and I haven’t regretted the decision once. I still plan to pursue MIS applications in the medical field and believe that a tremendous overhaul of the medical system will come due to implementations of new technology. We have recently witnessed the shift to EHR systems like Epic Systems and Allscripts and I believe that there is still room for improvement.