The Center awards research support on an annual basis to NYU students in finance or corporation law. Our past fellows have gone on to pursue careers in academia, professional practice and government service.

2007 - 2008 Rosa Comella

Rosa Comella holds her doctoral degree (S.J.D. 2004) and her masters degree (LL.M 1996) from Harvard University, as well as a doctoral degree and law degree from the University of Zaragoza.  She was formerly an associate professor of law at the University of Zaragoza.  In 2005, Ms. Comella was appointed the Emile Noel Fellow at NYU.  Her work focuses on comparative studies between the US and European Union with a special focus on environmental regulation. 

2005 - 2007 Lise Pedersen

Lise Pedersen received her LL.M. from the NYU School of Law in May 2004 and holds law degrees from Stockholm University and the University of Copenhagen. She is currently engaged in research focusing on corporate directors' fiduciary duties as well as the legal and economic aspects of financial contracting, particularly with respect to hedgefunds.

From 2000-2003, Ms. Pedersen was an associate at Plesner Svane Groenborg, a large Danish firm, working with corporate law, corporate finance, securities law issues, as well as contracts and litigation. Also, she has worked for two ministries in Denmark and as an intern for the International Trade Centre (UNCTAD/WTO) in Geneva, Switzerland.

2004-2005 Florencia Marotta Wurgler

Florencia received her J.D. from NYU Law School in 2001 and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. Her research and teaching interests include corporate law, contracts, commercial law, economics analysis of law, and bankruptcy. Her most recent research project, entitled "Minding the Gap in Liquidated Damage Clauses: Why Courts Should Stop Insisting on the Penalty Doctrine," questions the ability of contract law's penalty doctrine to efficiently deal with the complexities created by unforeseen contingencies. Currently, she is pursuing empirical research on standard terms in Internet contracts.

In 2003-04, Florencia was the Corporate Fellow at the Center for Corporate, Securities, and Financial Law at Fordham Law School, where she taught Corporations. From 2001-03, she was an associate in the Corporate group at Davis Polk & Wardwell.

2004 - 2005 Lise Pedersen

Lise Pedersen received her LL.M. from the NYU School of Law in May 2004 and holds law degrees from Stockholm University and the University of Copenhagen. She is currently engaged in research focusing on corporate directors' fiduciary duties as well as the legal and economic aspects of financial contracting, particularly with respect to hedgefunds.

From 2000-2003, Ms. Pedersen was an associate at Plesner Svane Groenborg, a large Danish firm, working with corporate law, corporate finance, securities law issues, as well as contracts and litigation. Also, she has worked for two ministries in Denmark and as an intern for the International Trade Centre (UNCTAD/WTO) in Geneva, Switzerland.

2003 - 2004 Vinay B. Nair

Vinay received his doctorate in Finance from the Stern School of Business after completing his undergraduate degree in engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, where he received the Governor's Gold Medal.  Vinay's research deals with issues relating to corporate governance, corporate finance, firm valuation and firm organization.  He is currently an Assisant Professor of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.  A copy of Vinay's recent research papers, "Governance Mechanisms and Equity Prices" and "Corporate Governance and Internal Organization" can be found in our working paper series.  Click here for news about one of his studies, "The Impact of Shareholder News on Bondholders."

2002 - 2003 Galya Levy

Galya Levy received her LL.M. from NYU Schoo of Law in May 2003. She has an LL.B. from Haifa University in Israel, and an M.B.A. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is currently residing in Jerusalem.

Galya's graduate studies at NYU focused on corporate law, securities regulation, mergers and acquisitions, and international trade. In addition, she conducted research on the risks involved in financial derivatives trading. During her year of fellowship at the Center, she wrote an article on the uses of ambiguity in commercial contracts to be published in a forthcoming book on contract law by the London School of Economics.

Today, Galya serves as a senior advisor to the Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure. The Ministry in in charge of energy and water in Israel, including the oil, fuel, gas, and electricity sectors. The Minister of National Infrastructure, Joseph Partiszky, is a member of the Shinui Party, which is committed to the separation of church and state, the privatization of companies managed by the states, and the promotion of a liberal economy in Israel. Galya's work focuses on privatization, restructuring, and market regulation. She is involved in the process of the establishment of a new natural gas system in Israel. She coordinates with the Ministry's intervention with the Government and Parliament, and she oversees the restructuring of the Monopoly of the Israeli Refineries Company.

2001 - 2002 Olga Filipenko

Olga received her M.S. in Math from Tulane University and a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Her areas of research interests include corporate finance, incomplete contracting and structure, design and boundaries of the firm. Her work for the Center focused on projects relating to the rationale for strategic alliances and joint ventures. While she has conducted both theoretical and empirical research, her empirical research projects have dealt with the optimality of the different contractual features in strategic alliance agreements. She is currently the Vice President and Senior Credit Officer of Moody's Investor Services.

2001 - 2002 Umut Kolcuoglu

Umut received his LL.M. from NYU School of Law in May 2001 and has an LL.B. from Istanbul University School of Law in Turkey. From 1998 to 2000 he was an associate at an Istanbul law firm and focused on cross-border corporate transactions. His research interests include corporate and contractual governance, joint ventures, and equity linkages in strategic alliances. Umut is the co-author of "The New Turkish Banking Law," published in the Global Banking and Financial Law Review 2000-02.

2000 - 2001 Michal Gal

Michal received her J.S.D. from the University of Toronto and served as a postdoctoral fellow of the Center for two years. Her prinicpal academic interest is optimal competition policy for small economies with a specific focus on merger and oligopoly regulation. In addition to lecturing in some clases and seminars during her first semester as a Center fellow, she presented her work on the interface between competition policy and intellectual property at the International conference organized by the American Bar Association Antitrust Division and the Israeli Antitrust Authority. Other research interests include a novel solution to deal with oligopolistic markets through the introduction of government-supported maverick firms and a new look at the regulation of essential facilities. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Haifa School of Law in Israel.

2000 - 2001 Yiming Qian

Yiming worked at the Center as a research fellow for Professor Robert Daines. Her areas of research interest include corporate finance, corporate governance, and banking. Her work has examined the role of markets and banks in allocational efficiency, bank management compensation structures, and design of management compensation structures which elicit optimal degrees of competition and cooperation in multi-divisional firms. Yiming has conducted both theoretical and empirical research and now serves as an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Iowa.

1999 - 2000 Claudia Agostinis

Claudia is a scholar in the field of comparative law from the University of Milan School of Law in Italy. She received her LL.M. from the NYU School of Law in 2001 and concentrated her research efforts on the law of business finance for small enterprise in common law countries. She is currently an Associate in the Corporate and Commercial law department of Baker & McKenzie in Milan, Italy.

1999 - 2000 Charu G. Raheja

Charu received her doctoral degree from the Stern School of Business in 2000 and has written on the importance of inside directors in corporate governance. She is now Assistant Professor of Finance at the Owen School of Management, Vanderbilt University.

If you are a student at the NYU School of Law or the Stern School of Business and are interested in learning more about the Center's Graduate Fellows program, please contact the Center.