Team
Alexis Meyer-Cirkel, PhD
Founder and Coordinator
Alexis is the founder of Saalt, he holds a MSc from the London School of Economics (LSE), and obtained his PhD in economics from the Goethe University in Frankfurt. His experiences in the financial sector include the interest rate derivatives team of Morgan Stanley in London, the European Central Bank, Allianz Research, and the Brazilian Central Bank. Alexis is currently on sabbatical leave from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, where he worked for over four years on various country and macro related issues. He also manages the family farm at the Brazilian countryside.
Jian Li, PhD
Head of Economic/Financial Modeling
Jian Li is an assistant professor of Economics at University of Luxembourg, with research interests in household finance, learning and applied microeconomics. His past and recent work relates with optimal portfolio choice with un-insurable risk, learning in financial markets, investor risk preference detection and capital in/out flow in emerging markets. He received a PhD in Economics at Goethe University Frankfurt and a bachelor’s degree in International Economics at Jilin University, China.
Past Contributors and Research Assistants
Débora Bilard
Debora holds an M.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She wrote on monetary developments at the central bank of Israel. In the Netherlands, she undertook research on the macroeconomics of pension policy, teaching at the University of Amsterdam and giving consultancy to the social security administration. In Brazil, she performed macroeconomic analyses for an association of ICT enterprises.
Diego Gomes
Diego holds a PhD in economics from the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His expertise in the financial sector include the corporate finance and M&A teams of Accenture, the portfolio management and research teams of Lagoa Asset Management, and the pricing and P&L teams of Gávea Investments.
Tobias Sichert
Tobias holds a MSc in business administration from the Ludwigs-Maximilian-Universität (LMU) Munich. He is currently pursuing a PhD in finance at the GSEFM and works at the Goethe University in Frankfurt as a research assistant. His research interests include asset pricing, portfolio theory and behavioral finance. He has multiple experiences in the financial sector, including derivatives trading and portfolio management.
Cristina Tessari
Cristina holds a BSc in Economics from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianopolis, and a MSc in Economics from Getulio Vargas Foundation (EPGE/FGV), Rio de Janeiro. She will start her PhD in Finance and Economics at Columbia GSB, NY in Fall 2016. Her main research interests include: financial econometrics, portfolio selection, risk management, derivatives, and asset pricing. Her research work has been presented at many academic conferences and published in referred journals.
Sijia Zhang
Sijia Zhang is a third year Ph.D student at Goethe University Frankfurt. She completed her Master study in Money and Finance at Goethe University Frankfurt, and meanwhile passed CFA Level III. Her research interests are venture capital and bond market liquidity.
Cesar Rodrigues
IT Infrastructure
Cesar is a software engineering specialist with extensive experience in different disciplines, ranging from architecture development to coding and testing. He is a process engineer for software development methodologies and maturity models (CMMI, ISO 9000, Agile and others). Cesar is also a lecturer for post-graduate students in IT systems and computational science at PUC Minas. He holds a BSc and MSc in Computer Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.