Advisory Committee
James Forest, Nominating Committee Chair
James Forest is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst and a research associate with the Center for International Securities and Derivatives Markets. Forest is currently finishing his dissertation at the Isenberg School of Management in the field of finance. Prior to his doctoral studies at UMass, he earned a master's degree in finance at Northeastern University and a bachelor's degree in economics from Framingham State University.
Forest has held full-time teaching positions at the University of Connecticut, University of New Hampshire and Central Connecticut State University. He has also taught as an adjunct at American International College in Springfield Massachusetts.
His teaching experience has spanned a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses, including: Financial Markets & Institutions, Financial Econometrics & Modeling, Investment Analysis & Portfolio Management, and a number of other courses.
For his teaching, he was awarded the Teaching Innovation Award 2010 at the University of Connecticut. The award was given by the School of Business Administration for development of experiential learning based trading room courses.
Forest has been a member of numerous professional and scholarly societies, including: American Economic Association, American Finance Association, Financial Management Association, National Association for Business Economists, Econometric Society, Society for Financial Econometrics, International Institute of Forecasters and other scholarly societies. He has presented papers at numerous academic conferences.
Previously, Forest worked at Standard & Poor's as an economics editor and market analyst and at IBC Financial Data as a statistical analyst and associate editor. His research interests include: money and capital markets, financial institutions, financial econometrics, monetary economics, macroeconometric modeling, systemic risk, energy markets, and applied forecasting.
He has been Associate Editor for IBC's Bond Fund Report and Money Fund Report and has been been a referee for Economic Modeling, Applied Financial Economics, and the Journal of Economics & Finance. Jim has also been quoted in the New York Times, Barron's, and the New Britain Herald. He has also appeared on NPR Marketplace and the Lewis & Morrow Financial Hour on WTCC in Springfield.
James Gajewski, Arrangement
Committee Chair
James Gajewski is a competitive intelligence analyst currently working
in strategy and business creation at Raytheon. He completed his
undergraduate education in economics at the University of
Massachusetts
- Boston, where he continues to pursue a master's degree in
applied
economics. Before returning to school, he served for four years
in the
U.S. Marine Corps. He deployed to the Al Anbar province of Iraq,
where
his unit's operations made possible the reopening of the
border
crossing from Syria to Iraq. Deploying next at sea, he
participated in
joint exercises with allied militaries in North Africa and the
Aegean.
After an earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, he deployed to
provide
security and deliver humanitarian aid in and around
Port-au-Prince. He
currently serves as a sergeant in the Inactive Ready Reserve.
Gajewski joined the National Association for Business Economics in 2011
and participated in the Certificate Program in Applied
Econometrics. He
values the link that NABE creates between the academic and
business
worlds. Current research topics include the role of economics in
maritime security and the impact of terrorism on international
economics. Gajewski also has a strong interest in veteran
homelessness,
and he has begun collecting data to explore how the determinants
of
veteran homelessness might differ from those of homelessness in
general.
Catherine L. Mann, Liaison
Committee Chair
Catherine L. Mann holds the Barbara '54 and Richard M. Rosenberg Chair
in Global Finance at the International Business School at Brandeis
University, where she has been a faculty member since 2006. She
is also
a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Prior
to
Brandeis, during 20-plus years in Washington, she was a senior
fellow
at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and had
policy
appointments at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the
President's
Council of Economic Advisers, and the World Bank.
Mann has been a member of the National Association for Business
Economics since the mid-1990s and is a former member of the NABE
Board.
At Brandeis, she is the faculty advisor for the NABE-Brandeis
student
chapter, which hosts the annual macroeconomic Crisis Game.
Mann's current research focuses on these related topics: U.S.
international trade, capital flows and the dollar; and
information
technology and services trade in global markets. Her writing
includes
more than 85 scholarly articles and seven books. She appears
frequently
on Bloomberg, CNBC, PBS NewsHour, and NPR Marketplace. She
received her
Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
her undergraduate degree from Harvard University.