22nd Annual M&A and Economic Forum

Kam Buckner is a native of the Southside of Chicago. He has the honor of representing the 26th Legislative District in the Illinois House of Representatives. The district, completely situated in the city of Chicago, contains parts of South Shore, Hyde Park, Bronzeville, Downtown, River North, and the Gold Coast. During his tenure in the IL General Assembly he has served as the Illinois House Black Caucus Chair, and Majority Whip for the House Democratic Caucus. He currently serves as Assistant Majority Leader. Rep. Buckner leads and sits on numerous committees, including but not limited to the Adoption & Child Welfare Committee; Executive Committee; Judiciary – Civil & Criminal Committees; Revenue & Finance; Family Preservation Subcommittee.

He previously served as executive director of World Sport Chicago and in the front office of the Chicago Cubs. He spent a number of years in the public sector on the staff of Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, LA and US Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. Kam has taught Public Policy at the University of Chicago and was a 2017 Emerging Leader with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He holds a BA from the University of Illinois and a JD from DePaul University. He is a proud husband and father who continues to fight for the future of Illinois.

Mike Duggan is the 75th mayor of the City of Detroit.  He has been in office since January 2014 and currently is serving his third four-year term, which will expire at the end of 2025. Born in Detroit, Duggan has spent his entire career working in the city to solve some of the most complex issues facing Detroiters, including crime, blight, transportation, health care and access to jobs. 

When he was first elected, Detroit was in the midst of bankruptcy and could not deliver the most basic services due to broken processes and loss of tax base. It also was faced with more than 40,000 abandoned homes dragging down neighborhoods.  Under Mayor Duggan’s leadership so far, 35,000 of the vacant homes have been removed or renovated, City services are reliable, and the City’s strong financial stewardship has brought the City’s credit rating to within one notch of investment grade.  

In recent years, the Mayor’s success in landing major employers, such as Stellantis’ new Jeep assembly -plant, GM’s Factory Zero, Ford’s Michigan Central campus and a new 4-million-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center, helped drive down Detroit’s unemployment rate to its lowest level (4.8%) in recorded history.  Through Duggan’s workforce development program, Detroit At Work, and President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, Detroiters now have access to $100 million in job readiness programs to help make them eligible for the abundant job opportunities in the city. 

In his third term, Mayor Duggan has shifted the City’s focus from removing blight to creating beauty through more than 160 renovated parks, hundreds of City-sponsored public murals and the conversion of miles of largely abandoned railroad lines as part of the 26-mile recreational loop, the Joe Louis Greenway.  

Mayor Duggan married Dr. Sonia Hassan in 2021 and has four adult children.  

Eugene F. Fama, 2013 Nobel laureate in economic sciences, is widely recognized as the "father of modern finance." His research is well known in both the academic and investment communities. He is strongly identified with research on markets, particularly the efficient markets hypothesis. He focuses much of his research on the relation between risk and expected return and its implications for portfolio management. His work has transformed the way finance is viewed and conducted.

Fama is a prolific author, having written two books and published more than 100 articles in academic journals. He is among the most cited researchers in economics.

In addition to the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Fama was the first elected fellow of the American Finance Association in 2001. He is also a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the first recipient of three major prizes in finance: the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics (2005), the Morgan Stanley American Finance Association Award for Excellence in Finance (2007), and the Onassis Prize in finance (2009). Other awards include the 1982 Chaire Francqui (Belgian National Science Prize), the 2006 Nicholas Molodovsky Award from the CFA Institute recognizing his work in portfolio theory and asset pricing, and the 2007 Fred Arditti Innovation Award given by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Center for Innovation. He was awarded doctor of law degrees by the University of Rochester and DePaul University, a doctor honoris causa by the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and a doctor of science honoris causa by Tufts University.

Fama earned a bachelor's degree from Tufts University in 1960, followed by an MBA and PhD from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (now the Booth School) in 1964. He joined the GSB faculty in 1963.

John Huizinga conducts empirical studies in macroeconomics and finance, both domestic and international and also studies econometric theory. His research has appeared in numerous journals, including Econometrics, the Journal of Econometrics, and the Journal of Monetary Economics.

Huizinga was first drawn to macroeconomics after observing how the economy exerts a powerful influence on people's lives. Prior to joining the Chicago Booth faculty in 1980, Huizinga taught at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has also taught at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. From 1993 to 2004, Huizinga served as the deputy dean for the faculty at Chicago Booth. A combination of the negotiation experience from this position and being in the right place at the right time led Huizinga to become the agent of NBA star Yao Ming.

His teaching has been influenced by his professional and practical experience, and also by having had a son in college. "When I am making decisions about my teaching, I ask myself, 'Is this the way I would want a professor to treat my son?'" But the best part of teaching, according to Huizinga, "is you get to learn a lot of new stuff. Also, a big part of it is the gratification you get when you help other people learn."

In addition to learning to think logically and deeply about macroeconomic issues, he hopes his students learn to clearly convey their views about the economy to others.

Huizinga earned two bachelor's degrees cum laude in economics and in math, from Pomona College in 1976. He earned a PhD in economics from MIT in 1980 and joined the Chicago Booth faculty later that year.

Tim is cochairman of Global Mergers & Acquisitions in the Investment Banking Division (IBD). He serves on the IBD Client and Business Standards Committee.

Prior to assuming his current role in 2011, Tim served as head of Mergers & Acquisitions in the Americas. From 2002 through 2008, he was global head of the Consumer Retail Group in Investment Banking. Before that, Tim was co-chief operating officer in the Communications, Media and Entertainment Department in New York. He joined Goldman Sachs in 1986 as part of the two-year analyst program and worked in the Mergers & Acquisitions Department until 1997. Tim was named managing director in 1996 and partner in 1998.

Tim serves as chair of the Jefferson Scholarship Foundation at the University of Virginia (UVA) and as a member of the Board of Managers at UVA. He also sits on the Endowment Trust Board at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Board of Trustees of the Brooklyn Public Library.

Tim earned a BA from the University of Virginia in 1986.

Steve Kaplan conducts research on private equity, venture capital, entrepreneurial finance, corporate governance and corporate finance. He has published papers in a number of academic and business journals. Kaplan is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

He is the co-creator of the Kaplan-Schoar PME (Public Market Equivalent) private equity benchmarking approach. A Fortune Magazine article referred to him as "probably the foremost private equity scholar in the galaxy.”

Kaplan teaches advanced MBA and executive courses in entrepreneurial finance and private equity, corporate finance, corporate governance, and wealth management. BusinessWeek named him one of the top 12 business school teachers in the country.

Professor Kaplan co-founded the entrepreneurship program at Booth. With his students, he helped start Booth’s business plan competition, the New Venture Challenge (NVC), which has included over 800 companies that have raised almost $1 billion and created over $8 billion in value including GrubHub, Braintree/Venmo and Simple Mills.

Kaplan serves on the board of Morningstar and several fund and company advisory boards. He has been a member of the faculty since 1988.

He received his AB, summa cum laude, in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Harvard College and earned a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University.

Dr. Emily Rogalski is Professor of Neurology at the University of Chicago where she is Director of a Healthy Aging & Alzheimer’s Research Care (HAARC) Center. She is a clinical and cognitive neuroscientist and her research falls under the broad umbrella of aging and dementia. Using a multimodal approach, she focuses her investigations on two aging perspectives: primary progressive aphasia (PPA) in which neurodegenerative disease invades the language network and SuperAging in which individuals are seemingly resistant to the deleterious changes in memory associated with “normal” or more typical cognitive aging. Her PPA research has helped to characterize the clinical and anatomical features of PPA including drivers of disease progression, identification of risk factors, and refinement of our understanding of language network organization. She has also pioneered a line of research concentrated on maximizing care and quality of life for individuals living with PPA and related dementias. She operationalized the SuperAging phenotype and has helped to establish the unique biologic, molecular, genetic, and psychosocial features associated with SuperAging. She currently leads the SuperAging Research Initiative which holds promise for identifying protective factors for avoiding Alzheimer’s disease, optimizing health span, and reducing stigma and negative expectations associated with aging.

Pietro Veronesi is the Chicago Board of Trade Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Additionally, he is a former director of the American Finance Association and co-editor of the Review of Financial Studies.

Veronesi conducts research that focuses on asset pricing, stock and bond valuation under uncertainty, bubbles and crashes, return predictability and stochastic volatility. Most recently, he has been interested in studying, both theoretically and empirically, the interaction between government interventions and the behavior of asset prices. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2015 AQR Insight award, the 2012 and 2003 Smith Breeden prizes from the Journal of Finance; the 2008 WFA award; the 2006 Barclays Global Investors Prize from the EFA; the 2006 Fama/DFA prizes from the Journal of Financial Economics; and the 1999 Barclays Global Investors/Michael Brennan First Prize from the Review of Financial Studies.

Professor Veronesi teaches both masters- and PhD-level courses. He is the recipient of the 2009 McKinsey Award for Excellence in Teaching.

His undergraduate work was in economics at Bocconi University where he received a laurea magna cum laude with honor in 1992. He earned a master's degree with distinction in 1993 from the London School of Economics. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty upon obtaining his PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 1997.

Dennis G. Whyte is the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, and director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A recognized leader in fusion research, especially in the magnetic confinement of plasmas, Whyte has paved an innovative and faster path to producing fusion energy. He leads the fusion project, SPARC—a compact, high-field, net fusion energy fusion device—in collaboration with private fusion startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). The core of the SPARC project was formed over eight years ago during a design course led by Whyte to challenge assumptions in fusion. Many of the ideas underpinning the high-field approach—including the use of HTS for high-field, demountable magnets, liquid blankets, and ARC (a fusion power plant concept)—have been conceived of or significantly advanced in his design courses. Whyte has over 350 publications, is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and has served on panels for the National Academies, the United States government, and the Royal Society. In 2018, Whyte received The Fusion Power Associates (FPA) Board of Directors Leadership Award which is given annually to individuals who have shown outstanding leadership qualities in accelerating the development of fusion. Whyte earned a B.Eng from the University of Saskatchewan, and an MS and PhD from Université du Québec.

Ben Zhao is the Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at University of Chicago.  He completed his PhD from Berkeley (2004) and his BS from Yale (1997). He is an ACM distinguished scientist, and recipient of the NSF CAREER award, MIT Technology Review’s TR-35 Award (Young Innovators Under 35), ComputerWorld Magazine’s Top 40 Tech Innovators award, Google Faculty award, and IEEE ITC Early Career Award. His work has been covered by media outlets such as Scientific American, New York Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, MIT Tech Review, and Slashdot. He has published more than 160 publications in areas of security and privacy, machine learning, networked systems, Internet measurements and HCI. He served as Program (co)chair for the World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016) and the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2018), and General Co-Chair for ACM HotNets 2020.