Distinguished Visiting Speakers

The MS2Discovery Institute's Distinguished Visiting Speaker Series brings renowned scholars to the institute. These prominent scholars give a public lecture where all are welcomed as well as an academic seminar. They also meet with faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows while visiting Laurier. Some of these visits are co-sponsored by various departments at Laurier.

Visiting Speaker Events

Distinguished Speakers to Date

Arun Muralidhar

May 5-6, 2026

Dr. Arun Muralidhar is Co-Founder of Mcube Investment Technologies LLC, Client CIO of AlphaEngine Global Investment Solutions and Adjunct Professor of Finance at Georgetown University. He holds a PhD in Economics from MIT Sloan School and a BA from Wabash College. At MIT he conducted his doctoral research under the Nobel Laureates Franco Modigliani and Robert C. Merton. Arun designed two award-winning bond innovations for retirement and a child’s education that Brazil issued in 2023 (in collaboration with Bob Merton). Arun has coauthored papers and books on pension reform with Bob Merton, and the book Rethinking Pension Reform (2004), with Franco Modigliani.

Arun has extensively worked and won numerous awards for papers in asset allocation and pricing, and portfolio and currency management. His books include “Fifty States of Grey: An Innovative Approach to the DC Retirement Crisis,” (2018), “A Nobel Retirement: 3 Nobels, 3 Pillars and 3 Facets of Investments” (2024), A SMART Approach to Portfolio Management (2011), Innovations in Pension Fund Management (2001), “Investment Theory and Practice – It’s All 'Relative'” (2024), and “GBI – Gimme Better Instruments or Goals-based Investing” (2025).

Jonathan Haskel

March 12-13, 2026

Jonathan Haskel is Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School, Imperial College London, where he has been since 2008. He has previously taught at Queen Mary, University of London, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, USA and Stern School of Business, New York University, USA. His research interests are productivity and growth. He has published in academic journals and, with Stian Westlake, written two non-technical books, Capitalism Without Capital: the Rise of the Intangible Economy (Princeton, 2017) and Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy (Princeton, 2022).

In addition to his academic activities, he has been an External Member of the Reporting Panel of the Competition and Markets Authority (2001-2009); a non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority (2016-2022) and an External Member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (2018-2024).

Matthew Jackson

Nov. 11-12, 2025

Matthew O. Jackson is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford Universityand an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. He was at Northwestern University and Caltech before joining Stanford. Jackson's research interests include game theory, microeconomic theory, and the study of social and economic networks, on which he has published many articles and the books 'The Human Network' and 'Social and Economic Networks'.

He also teaches an online course on networks and co-teaches two others on game theory. Jackson is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Econometric Society, the Game Theory Society, and an Economic Theory Fellow. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the von Neumann Award from Rajk Laszlo College, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize from the Toulouse School of Economics, and the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance, and Management.

Kevin Leyton-Brown

April 10-11, 2025

Kevin Leyton-Brown, Distinguished University Scholar and Professor Computer Science and at the University of British Columbia, holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, is an associate member of the Vancouver School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC; awarded in 2023), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM; awarded in 2020), and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI; awarded in 2018).

He was a member of a team that won the 2018 INFORMS Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Advanced Analytics, Operations Research and Management Science, described as "the leading O.R. and analytics award in the industry." He holds a PhD and M.Sc. from Stanford University (2003; 2001) and a B.Sc. from McMaster University (1998). He studies artificial intelligence and machine learning with a focus on connections both to microeconomic theory and to the design of algorithms for hard combinatorial problems.

He is the Director of UBC's Center for AI Decision-making and Action and has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Berkley, Stanford, and Microsoft Research New York, and in several countries including Israel. He has received multiple research awards including from Amazon, Facebook and Google. 

Marc Daniel Bernhardt

2019

Professor Marc Daniel Bernhardt, the Investors in Business Education Distinguished Professor, Gies College of Business, Professor of Finance at University of Illinois and the University of Warwick.

Bernhardt attended Oberlin College, graduating in 1981 with a degree in economics and mathematics, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (now the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University) in 1986 and was awarded the Alexander Henderson Award for an outstanding thesis in economic theory.

Bernhardt's research is focused on industrial organization, finance, and political economy.
Bernhardt’s visit was co-sponsored by the MS2Discovery Interdisciplinary Research Institute Distinguished Short-term Visiting Program, the Departments of Economics and Business (Finance), and the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics. 

Rebecca Morton

2016

Professor Rebecca Morton, Professor of Politics at New York University and the director of the Social Science Experimental Laboratory at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on voting processes as well as experimental methods. A Louisiana native, she received her MPA from Louisiana State University and her PhD from Tulane University. Substantively her research has focused on the electoral process, with a particular emphasis on the effects of different electoral institutions on electoral outcomes and the choices of candidates and voters. Her book, coauthored with Kenneth Williams, Learning by Voting: Sequence in Presidential Primaries and Other Elections (University of Michigan Press, 2001), addresses the effects of voting sequentially (as in presidential primaries in the United States or in elections with substantial mail-in and absentee voting) on the choices voters make and the candidates who win. She is the author or co-author of four books and numerous journal articles, which have appeared in noted outlets such as the American Economic Review, American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Politics, and Review of Economic Studies.

Morton’s visit was co-sponsored by MS2Discovery Interdisciplinary Research Institute Distinguished Short-term Visiting Program, the Departments of Economics and the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics, Laurier’s Special Initiative Funds.

John Roemer

2012

Professor John Roemer, the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. His research concerns political economy and distributive justice. His research includes inter-generational and inter-regional equity in the presence of climate change, and the micro-foundations of cooperation. He has published in journals of economics, political science and philosophy. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Corresponding Member of the British Academy. His work concerns distributive justice, political economy and the relationships between them. He is the author of several books including “Racism, Xenophobia, and Redistribution” and “Democracy, Education and Equality.

Roemer’s visit was co-sponsored by Distinguished Short-term Visiting Program of Laurier’s Seminar Series in Computational Science and Applied and Statistical Modelling (CSASM, the precursor of the MS2Discovery Institute’s Distinguished Visiting Series), the Laurier Center for Economic Research and Policy Analysis (LCERPA), the Department of Economics, the School of Business and Economics, and the Department of Economics at the University of Waterloo.

John Roemer

2006

Professor Donald G. Saari. Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Economics Professor (by courtesy) of Logic and Philosophy of Science and Director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California Irvine. His research interests range from the Newtonian N-body problem to voting theory and evolutionary properties of the social and behavioral sciences.

Saari’s visit was co-sponsored by the Distinguished Short-term Visiting Program of Laurier’s Seminar Series in Computational Science and Applied and Statistical Modelling (CSASM, the precursor of the MS2Discovery Institute’s Distinguished Visiting Series), the Perimeter Institute on celestial mechanics, the Department of Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University and the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics.