Prior ENTFIN Symposia

Panelists (listed alphabetically)

Brian Anderson is a Professor of Entrepreneurship and the Management and Entrepreneurship Area Director at the KU School of Business. He earned his doctorate in strategic management from the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University. Anderson's research centers on strategic entrepreneurship, focusing on causal inference, measurement issues, and Bayesian treatment of the entrepreneurial orientation and strategic entrepreneurial behavior constructs. His research appears in the leading entrepreneurship and management journals, and he serves as an associate editor for strategic entrepreneurship at the Journal of Business Venturing, and on the editorial board of Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. He teaches in the areas of analytics, data science, and strategy.

Cristiano Bellavitis is Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Whitman School of Management, Syracuse University. He is also the co-editor of Venture Capital: An International Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance. His research interests cross the traditional boundaries between entrepreneurship, management, and finance disciplines. His research focuses on entrepreneurial finance, more precisely venture capital, initial coin offerings, and blockchain. He has published in peer-reviewed academic journals including Organization Science, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, British Journal of Management, Journal of Small Business Management, Journal of Business Venturing Insights, among others.

Douglas Cumming, J.D., Ph.D., CFA, is the DeSantis Distinguished Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship at the College of Business, Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. Douglas has published over 195 articles in leading refereed academic journals in finance, management, and law and economics, such as the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of International Business Studies. His work has been cited over 23,000 times according to Google Scholar. He is the Managing Editor-in-Chief of the Review of Corporate Finance (2021-current) and British Journal of Management (2020-current). Douglas has published 21 academic books, including Crowdfunding: Fundamental Cases, Facts, and Insights (Elsevier Academic Press, 2019). Douglas’ work has been reviewed in numerous media outlets, including The Economist, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker.

Will Drover is Associate Professor and Department Chair at the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Department at the Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University. His teaching and research primarily focus on the area of new venture finance. Professor Drover’s research has been published in numerous leading peer-reviewed journals and has been featured by outlets such as Forbes and the National Venture Capital Association. He also is a field editor for the Journal of Business Venturing. Professor Drover has delivered several invited talks, including the keynote address at one of the world’s largest symposiums for startup investors at Microsoft in Silicon Valley. Drover has led four innovation-based consulting projects for the U.S. State Department. He is also an instructor for the U.S. Department of Defense via IVMF, regularly teaching innovation courses on international military bases. Professor Drover is an active investor in early-stage startups, focusing on robotics, software, biotechnology, among others. Drover is an avid kiteboarder, wakeboarder, and 10-time triathlete. Drover was also a pole vaulter at the University of Missouri.

Sofia Johan, Ph.D., earned her first degree in Law from the University of Liverpool and her LLM in International Economic Law from the University of Warwick, both in England. After working for several years in the financial markets, she returned to academia and earned her Ph.D. in Law and Economics from Tilburg University in The Netherlands. Her areas of expertise and research interest include legal and ethical issues in financial markets, entrepreneurial finance, and regulation of financial markets around the world. Dr. Johan is the author of three books and more than 72 articles in refereed journals. Her research has appeared in such leading journals as the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Oxford Review of Economics. She is a co-editor of Venture Capital: An International Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance and an associate editor of the British Journal of Management. She is also Chair in Entrepreneurial Finance at University of Aberdeen and has been a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales and the University of Cambridge. She is also a PADI licensed scuba diver.

Sophie Manigart is full professor of Corporate Finance at Vlerick Business School and Ghent University. She was a guest professor at Wharton Business School (University of Pennsylvania), London Business School, and IE Business School (Madrid). Her research focuses on the financing of entrepreneurial enterprises, as well from the demand perspective as from the supplier perspective. In particular, she studies the interactions between business angels, venture capital investors, and entrepreneurs. Sophie’s work has been published in leading entrepreneurship and management journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Journal of Management Studies, Small Business Economics, among others. Sophie is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Business Venturing, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, and Venture Capital: An International Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance. Until recently, she was also an associate editor at Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice. 

Ramana Nanda is a Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance and Academic Lead at the Institute for Deep Tech Entrepreneurship at Imperial, a Research Fellow in the Financial Economics Programme of the CEPR, and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School. His research examines financing frictions facing new ventures, with an aim to help entrepreneurs with fundraising and to shed light on how financial intermediaries, corporate R&D, and policy makers can improve the odds of selecting and commercializing the most promising ideas and technologies in the economy. For the academic years 2007 through 2020, Ramana was on the full-time faculty of Harvard Business School, most recently as Sarofim-Rock Professor and co-director of the Private Capital Project.  He received his Ph.D. from MIT's Sloan School of Management and has a BA and MA in Economics from Trinity College, Cambridge, U.K. He is a recipient of the 2020 ERC Consolidator Grant and, 2015 Kauffman Prize Medal, that is awarded annually to one scholar under age 40 whose research has made a significant contribution to the literature in entrepreneurship. Prior to starting his Ph.D., Ramana was based in the London and New York offices of Oliver, Wyman & Company, where he worked primarily with clients in global capital markets as well as in small-business banking.  He continues to advise startup ventures on their financing strategies and also works with philanthropists and investors looking to back "deep tech" entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges.