Biography
Raja Velu received his PhD in business/statistics from University of Wisconsin-Madison and his master’s degree from Indian Statistical Institute. He taught in the UW-System from 1983 to 1998 and at Syracuse University from 1998 to 2021 and was appointed Professor Emeritus in Finance at Syracuse. He has also held visiting positions at Stanford, National University of Singapore, Singapore Management University and Indian School of Business. Velu’s research interests include asset pricing in finance and big data modeling and high-dimensional forecasting in statistics and machine learning. His publications have appeared in Biometrika, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Journal of Econometrics and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis among others. He has co-authored two well-cited books: Algorithmic Trading and Quantitative Analysis and Multivariate Reduced-Rank Regression. Velu has extensive industry experience. He was the technical architect in the forecasting group for Sponsored Search at Yahoo! He was instrumental in building the Click-Bid landscape widely used by advertisers. He has held visiting researcher positions in the Intelligent Information Systems Group at IBM-Almaden Labs, in Search Labs at Microsoft Research -Silicon Valley, in Google Finance and in Google Cloud Computing divisions and in Linear Quantitative Research unit at JPMC. He has several patents based on his work in industry.
