Will Cong is the Rudd Family Professor of Management, a tenured Professor of Finance, and the founding director of FinTech at Cornell Initiative and the Digital Economy and Financial Technology (DEFT) Lab. He is also a Finance editor at the Management Science, Research Associate at the NBER, and cofounder of two international research forums (ABFR and CBER). He was formerly a Kauffman Junior Fellow, Poets & Quants World Best Business School Professor, George P. Shultz Scholar, and Lieberman Fellow. He previously taught at the University of Chicago after earning his Finance Ph.D. and MS in Statistics from Stanford, and A.M. in Physics jointly with A.B. in Math and Physics from Harvard.
Will specializes in applied theory, asset pricing, corporate finance, and information economics. He pioneered interdisciplinary research on Tokenomics, AI for finance, blockchain forensics and design, and how digitization and big data interact with and influence competition, growth, and entrepreneurship. His work has been recognized with numerous best paper prizes and grants and has been widely circulated and adopted in the industry. He is highly sought-after not only as keynote speaker at various international conferences and forums, but also as advisors for FinTech firms and quant funds, as well as government and regulatory agencies around the globe.