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Maureen O'Hara

Maureen O'Hara

  • Professor
  • Robert W. Purcell Professor of Management

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Faculty Area

Interdisciplinary Theme

  • FinTech at Cornell

Faculty Expertise

  • Finance
  • Ethics

Contact

Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management

607.255.3645

mo19@cornell.edu

Cornell Directory Entry

Website

Biography

Maureen O’Hara is Purcell Professor of Finance at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. A citizen of both Ireland and the United States, she received her doctorate from Northwestern University and Honorary Doctorates from Facultés Universitaires Catholiques à Mons (FUCAM), Universität Bern, and University College Dublin.

O'Hara is an expert on market microstructure, and she publishes widely in banking and financial intermediaries, law and finance, and blockchain and cryptomarkets. She is the author of numerous journal articles as well as the books Market Microstructure Theory (Blackwell; 1995), and High Frequency Trading: New Realities for Traders, Markets, and Regulators (Risk Books; 2013). Her most recent book, Something for Nothing: Arbitrage and Ethics on Wall Street, was published in 2016 by Norton Books.

A past president of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, and the Financial Management Association, she was executive editor of the Review of Financial Studies. O’Hara has served on a variety of corporate boards including NewStar Financial, Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA), The Jeffrey Company, and Investment Technology Group, Inc. (ITG), where she was chairman of the board. She is currently an advisor to Ava Labs, Inc., a cryptocurrency blockchain company and to BMLL Technologies, a data and analytics provider. A member of the CFTC-SEC Emerging Regulatory Issues Task Force (the “flash crash” committee), she has also served on the Global Advisory Board of the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI), the Advisory Board of the Office of Financial Research, U.S. Treasury, the SEC Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee, and is currently on the Financial Advisory Roundtable of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Recent honors include being selected as Quant Researcher of the Year in 2023 by the Journal of Portfolio Management, receiving the Vertin Award from the CFA Institute, and being named to Institutional Investors Trading Technology Top 40.

Selected Publications

Recent Courses

  • NBA 5430/LAW 6430 - Financial Markets and Institutions
  • NRE 5020 - PhD Seminar - Market Microstructure

Academic Degrees

  • PhD Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 1979
  • MA Northwestern University, 1976
  • BS University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1975