Collaborative efforts between the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems (CoFES) and Wentao Zhao, manager of global quantitative analytics at ExxonMobil, are exploring multiple perspectives in energy economics and the financial markets.
For the past two years, Zhao’s approaches to growing academia-industry collaboration at Rice University have included serving as lecturer in the elective course Quantitative Financial Risk Management (STAT 449/649), an advisory board member to CoFES and adjunct professor to the Department of Statistics.
This spring, Zhao added a new platform to facilitate discussions and interactions. As organizer of the annual ExxonMobil Quant Conference, he invited four Rice University professors from the Department of Economics, Department of Statistics, and Jones Graduate School of Business to present and discuss academic and applied research.
The conference, held on February 20, 2024, drew audiences from across ExxonMobil’s business infrastructure and included four lectures and a panel discussion on The Quantitative Challenges in Energy Trading and Economics.
Rice lecturers included Peter Hartley, the George A. Peterkin Professor of Economics and Rice Scholar of Energy Economics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy; Katherine Ensor, the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics and director of CoFES; Kenneth Medlock III, the James A. Baker, III and Susan G. Baker Fellow in Energy and Resource Economics and senior director of the Center for Energy Studies at the Baker Institute for Public Policy; and Vincent Kaminski, professor in the practice of energy management at the Jones Graduate School of Business.
Energy Economics
Hartley has specialized in energy economics issues for 35 years. His lecture, A Model of the Oil Market and LNG Trade, pointed to the value of frequent interactions between industry and academia to examine the interplay between theory and evidence.
Over the decades, both Hartley and Medlock have co-published extensively covering a range of energy-related issues. They also co-direct the Masters of Energy Economics (MEEcon), a program unique to Houston and Rice for its decades-long foundation in Rice’s Department of Economics, the Baker Institute and the Center for Energy Studies (CES), a university-affiliated think tank founded in 2012.
Medlock’s lecture was on The Economics of Energy Transitions.
Finance and Trading
Kaminski is a specialist in quantitative analysis and risk management for large financial institutions and the merchant energy industry. He is the author of the textbook Managing Energy Price Risk. Before joining Rice’s faculty, he was an executive at Citigroup, Sempra Energy Trading, Reliant Energy, Citadel Investment Group, and Enron where he was the head of the quantitative modeling group from 1992 to 2002.
He presented on Value-at-Risk: Exploring Alternatives to the Conventional Models.
Ensor discussed Estimating Dependence and Tail Events in Markets. She brought forward practical tools that address crucial statistical issues in risk modeling for energy markets and offered opportunities for future collaborations to innovate on the fundamental statistical methods.
Since its founding in 2002, CoFES has collaborated with departments at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering, School of Social Sciences, and the Jones School of Business to offer interdisciplinary programs in research, education, and outreach. This has included open events, such as the Eubank Conference on Real World Markets, and many elective courses and research opportunities.
- Shawn Hutchins, Communications and Marketing Specialist
