"After being a professor there until the age of 37, I thought, what else can I do?" She accompanied her husband to the U.S., used her applied math skills to receive an MBA at the University of Chicago, and undertook a joint research project with the famed U of C professor Eugene Fama.
Her background in math revealed that "many problems in investments are the same fundamentally as in areas including medicine, telecommunications or aerospace. They are optimization problems," she said.
Aiperion was spun out of her first firm, Core Capital Management, in 2019. She remains the chief investment officer and managing partner at Core Capital and manages both businesses in Chicago.
For pension plans and other allocators, Aiperion does deep analysis in areas including complex risk pricing (complex market situations, investments, etc.), governance, or modeling liabilities of pension plans using option-based frameworks.
If she were able to give advice to her younger self, she said: "I don't have regrets. If I had given advice to myself, I probably wouldn't have listened!"
On attracting more women to finance, "to me what's important is inclusion. I didn't want an all-women team (at Aiperion), but a diverse team. The goal is to not even think about that. But without actively working toward diversity and inclusion, we won't get there."