BCIC will be hosting our 2025 Finance and Investing Forum on Sunday, March 30, 2025 on the Bentley University campus. We are cordially inviting you, investors, entrepreneurs, innovators and lifelong learners, to join this forum, themed Investing at the Nexus of Innovation and Uncertainty: US and Asia Markets! The forum will include keynote and panel topics such as Geopolitical and Macroeconomic Trends, US-China Relations, Investor Effects on US-Listed Firms, The Chinese Economy and Its Global Impact, AI Investment and Business Applications, and Career Transitions , etc.
Date and Time
Sunday, Mar. 30, 2025, 2pm-6pm
Location
Bentley University, Wilder Pavilion
Adamian Academic Center
175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02452
Agenda and Speakers
● 1:30-2:00 Check-in
● 2:00-2:10 BCIC Opening Remarks
● 2:10-2:55 Opening Keynote: Dispelling myths about investors’ impact on US-listed firms
৹Speaker: Prof. Charles Wang, Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School
● 3:00-3:25 Keynote Talk 2: Geopolitics, US-China Trade, and China’s Rising Global Impact
৹Speaker: Prof. Hong Ru, Visiting Associate Professor of Finance at MIT Sloan
● 3:25-3:45 Coffee/Tea Break
● 3:45-4:35 Panel 1: Artificial Intelligence Investment and Business Applications
৹Speakers:
▪ Andrew Zhang, Partner at Epsilla (YC’23 AI startup)
▪ Vincent Zhang, Co-founder and CEO of Thinkverse (EdTech startup)
▪ Xiaofeng Xia, Co-founder of Inductive Solution Inc. (AI startup)
● 4:40-5:30 Panel 2: Leading a Successful and Dynamic Career in this Uncertain World
৹Speakers:
▪ Prof. Hong Ru, Visiting Associate Professor of Finance at MIT Sloan
▪ Juno Chen, Senior Portfolio Manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments
▪ Jun Fan, Career Coach and Lecturer at Boston University, and Lead Quantitative Researcher at Fidelity Investments
● 5:30-5:40 BCIC Closing Remarks
Speaker Bios (organized by the order of the agenda)
Prof. Charles C.Y. Wang is the Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is a research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and an associate editor of Management Science and Journal of Accounting Research, two leading management journals. His research and teaching focus on corporate governance and valuation.
He is currently course head of Financial Reporting and Control in the MBA core curriculum; he is also a coordinator of the school’s doctoral program, for which he has taught doctoral courses in financial reporting and corporate governance and applied econometrics as well as served on numerous dissertation committees. His teaching also included Business Analysis and Valuation in the MBA elective curriculum and Strategic Financial Analysis in executive education.
Professor Wang’s research in corporate governance and valuation has been published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Accounting and Economics, and the Accounting Review as well as practitioner publications such as Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Globe. Media outlets including The Economist, Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Fortune, Forbes, U.S. News, and The Atlantic have cited his research findings. His work has also been cited in legal proceedings and policy discussions, including the council of economic advisor’s economic report to the president and congressional testimonies. Professor Wang’s research has won several awards, including the Jensen Prize for the Best Paper in Corporate Finance in the Journal of Financial Economics and the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute’s Annual Investor Research Award.
Prof. Hong Ru is a Visiting Associate Professor of Finance at MIT Sloan School of Management, while also holding the position of tenured Associate Professor in the Banking & Finance division at Nanyang Business School, NTU.
His research interests include financial intermediary, Chinese economy, corporate finance, and household finance. Ru’s research has been published at top academic journals including Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Review of Finance, and Management Science. Ru is the Data Editor for the Journal of Finance. Ru also presented his research at many conferences including AFA, EFA, NBER, SFS Cavalcade, and received best paper awards and research excellence award multiple times. His research has been widely covered by media, such as INFORMS Resoundingly Human, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Strait Times, China Daily, NBER Digest, and ABFER Digest. Ru was the Research Director of the Centre of Excellence International Trading and the Centre for RMB Internalisation Studies in NTU.
Ru received his PhD in finance from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2015, and joined NTU as an Assistant Professor. Ru also graduated from the inaugural class of Master of Finance program at MIT Sloan in 2010.
Andrew Zhang is a partner at Epsilla, a YC ’23 AI startup, where he leads the Go-to-Market strategy. He has previously worked at Amazon, IBM, and various Silicon Valley startups. Andrew specializes in product-market fit consulting for AI startups and has taught data science and machine learning at Rutgers Business School. He co-authored Hyperledger Cookbook and is currently writing A Practical Guide to Ollama: Running LLMs and SLMs Locally for Packt Publishing.
In his early career, Andrew served as a tech lead overseeing one of the largest internet platforms. More recently, he has been spearheading an innovative AI program at Columbia University.
Vincent Zhang is the Co-founder and CEO of Thinkverse. He is a 3x EdTech founder and has an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Founded in 2023 and backed by top investors like Reach Capital and Xfund, Thinkverse partners with K-12 districts across the U.S. to provide an AI math tutor for every student, delivering personalized guidance and real-time feedback to improve math outcomes at scale.
Xiaofeng Xia is the Co-founder of Inductive Solution Inc., an AI startup dedicated to integrating artificial intelligence with domain-specific expertise to intelligently automate business operations with efficiency and accuracy. The company aims to develop context-aware AI that delivers reliable, real-world results without hallucinations.
Xiaofeng has 18 years of experience in machine learning and quantitative investing. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Wuhan University and master’s degrees in Applied Mathematics (Peking University), Mathematics (Emory University), and Computational Finance (Carnegie Mellon University).
Juno Chen, CFA is a senior portfolio manager of Global Asset Allocation at Columbia Threadneedle Investments. She is responsible for the portfolio management and research on multiple global asset allocation portfolios. She joined the firm in 2023. Previously, she was a global portfolio manager at Dimensional Fund Advisors in Singapore for eight years. Before that, she worked at State Street in Boston for five years as a fixed-income trader and then as a quantitative researcher in which she was responsible for conducting asset allocation and risk management research. She has been a member of the investment community since 2010.
Juno holds a Bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a Master of finance degree from MIT Sloan School of Management. In addition, she holds the CFA designation.
Jun Fan is a lecturer and career coach at the Boston University Questrom School of Business, responsible for teaching machine learning topics and guiding students for their career planning and job searching. Jun is also a lead quantitative researcher in the Quantitative Research and Investments group at Fidelity Investments. He is responsible for quantitative active alpha, portfolio construction and systematic trading research and development across all asset classes managed by Fidelity.
Prior to joining Fidelity Investments, Jun was a senior quantitative researcher at State Street Global Advisors and at Acadian Asset Management; the head of quantitative research at CargoMetrics Technologies and Partner/PM/researcher at FDO Partners specializing in quantitative research and systematic trading in high-frequency/mid-frequency Equities, FX and Commodities asset classes and has been working in the quantitative investment industry since 2005.
Jun earned a M.B.A. (honours) from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Shenzhen University. In addition, he completed his doctorate studies (all but dissertation) in Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.Co-organizers
Students should use their .edu email to register or show student ID when checking in on the event day.
