Raman Uppal is Professor of Finance at Edhec Business School. He holds a bachelors degree in Economics (Honors) from St. Stephen`s College at Delhi University, and M.A., M.B.A and Ph.D. degrees from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on optimal portfolio selection and asset allocation in dynamic environments, valuation of securities in capital markets, risk management, and exchange rates. He is an editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance, an associate editor of the Review of Asset Pricing Studies, a member of the editorial board of Mathematics and Financial Economics, and a former editor of the The Review of Financial Studies and the Review of Finance. With Piet Sercu, he is the author of the textbook "International Financial Markets and the Firm" (1995, South-Western Publishing) and of the research monograph "Exchange Rate Volatility, Trade and Capital Flows under Alternative Exchange Rate Regimes" (2000, Cambridge University Press), which received the Sanwa Monograph Award from New York University. His research has received a number of other awards from the Western Finance Association, Inquire-UK, and Europlace Institute of Finance (Institut Europlace de Finance). He has also received awards for excellence in teaching from The Wharton School, The University of British Columbia, and London Business School.

Julian Franks is a Professor of Finance and Academic Director of the Centre of Corporate Governance at the London Business School. Julian is widely published, in which his research focuses on bankruptcy and financial distress, corporate ownership and control, cost of capital and regulation. His work on ownership and control (with Colin Mayer and Stefano Rossi) has won two international prizes. Two of his published papers have been awarded prizes for the "best paper" of the year.He is Associate Editor of five finance journals. He served as a member of the DTI-Treasury committee for reviewing the UK`s insolvency code in 2001 and was a member of one of The Company Law Review?s committees on corporate governance. He has been an advisor to Ofcom and its predecessor Oftel for more than 15 years. He also advises other UK regulatory authorities including the ORR and Ofwat. He has been an expert witness for the UK government at The World Court at The Hague on an inter-governmental dispute on the matter of landing rights at Heathrow and more recently for Ofcom in three appeals to the Competition Appeals Tribunal. He advised (with Professor Brealey) The Office of Constitutional Affairs on the issue of outside equity for law firms and provided advice to a Treasury committee chaired by Paul Myners on a review of the governance of mutuals. Recently, he was a member of a government taskforce (the Breedon Committee) investigating new avenues of non bank sources of finance for small to medium sized companies. He is a non-executive director of OXERA and is on the international advisory boards of Stern Stewart. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California at both Berkeley and Los Angeles.