Practicum

MS Financial Engineering Program Announces Spring 2025 Practicum Winners

The 2025 UIUC MSFE Practicum Competition was judged by a panel of professors, practitioners and MSFE alumni:

Joe Signorelli, EVP/ Global Head of Quantitative Trading Solutions, Trading Technologies
Moti Konak, Global Head of Derivatives and Fixed Income, London Stock Exchange Group
Dan Averbukh, Co-founder and CEO, validityBase
Shelley Liu, MSFE Class 2015, Risk Director, ICE Clear Europe
Kamin Atsavasirilert, MSFE Class 2024, Senior Quantitative Associate, Capital One
Neil Pearson, UIUC Finance Harry A. Brandt Distinguished Professor
Martin Widdicks, UIUC Finance Professor, MSF Director, Josef and Margot Lakonishok Faculty Fellow
Chrys Vogiatzis, UIUC Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering Professor, Director of Professional and Online Education

The following teams were chosen as the winners:

First Place Winners

JP Morgan Chase Team 1, “SPX-VIX Joint Calibration with Neural SDE”

MSFE Student Team Members: Chayapon Lee-Isranukul, Jingxi Wei, Nianhua Yuan, Shicheng Zhang, and Mengjia Zhou

Corporate sponsor and advisors:

Yudong Yang, Quantitative Research VP, JPMorgan Chase
Charlie Che, Managing Director, NA Head of Equity Derivatives & Systematic Trading Quantitative Research, JPMorgan Chase

Ernst & Young Team 2, “Prepayment Modeling with Machine Learning”

MSFE Student Team Members: Mike Chen, Heyang Cui, Jiajing Liu, and Wei Liu

Corporate sponsor and advisors:

Yuqi Zhang, Manager, Quantitative Advisory Service, EY
Fangzhou Zhang, Senior Manager, EY
Zhengyuan Jiang, Quantitative Advisory Service – Senior, EY
Feng Zhang, Partner/Principal, Quantitative Advisory Services / Trading Book (QAS/TB) Co-Leader, EY

Second Place Winners

Houlihan Lokey Team 1, “Machine Learning for Convertible Bonds”,

MSFE Student Team Members: Yixuan Huo, Saurabh Jamadagni, Muhammad Nawaz Khan, and Quancheng Shao

Corporate sponsor and advisors:

Kelsey Guo, VP, Houlihan Lokey
Peter Zhu, Associate, Houlihan Lokey
Chong Zhao, Associate, Houlihan Lokey
Ruichen Zhao, Financial Analyst, Houlihan Lokey
Andrew MacNamara, Managing Director, Houlihan Lokey

JPMorgan Chase Team 2, “SPX-VIX Joint Calibration with Neural SDE”, 2^nd Place

MSFE Student Team Members: Aakash Bansal, Zhuwei Han, Yifan Meng, Yaoxi Tan, and Yiwen Zhang

Corporate sponsor and advisors:

Yudong Yang, Quantitative Research VP, JPMorgan Chase

Charlie Che, Managing Director, NA Head of Equity Derivatives & Systematic Trading Quantitative Research, JPMorgan Chase

We would like to thank all corporate sponsors for providing challenging and interesting practicum projects and advising the student teams, the judges for their time judging the competition, and all practicum project students for a great semester working so hard and successfully completing all the projects. To the winning teams and their corporate sponsors: a big congratulations!

What is the MS Financial Engineering Program Practicum?

A key part of the MSFE program is the "practicum" course based on real-world projects provided by industry partners. In this course, teams of students will work on projects or problems posed by or developed in cooperation with an industry partner. Through these projects, students will be exposed to "real world" financial engineering and risk management problems. Students will have the opportunity to use state-of-the-art analytic tools and software products to assist them in with such projects.

The projects are structured so that a finished product is delivered to the sponsor at the end of the semester.

The practicum is a win-win program. Students gain valuable experience and have an opportunity to significantly impact a company. Corporate partners see the practicum project as an opportunity to use talented, external manpower to tackle a project that requires specialized insight or tools. They also use the practicum as a chance to see your work on the job as a potential future employee.

What do our Practicum Sponsors have to say about the projects and teams?

“This group carried out the project beyond my expectations. The topic is very challenging mathematically and implementation wise. The team’s ability to turn ideas into results was truly impressive. They were able to derive all the mathematical results, even spotted an error from the original author. Experimented with a number of numerical algorithms and was able to reach very promising results. It gave me hope that MOT approach to vol fitting could lead to very tangible industrialized implementation. Great work, team!!!!” - JP Morgan Chase

“The students have demonstrated their presentation skills via weekly session with EY sponsors, during which they were able to describe model details clearly, justify key model choices with strong evidence, and raise inspiring questions to the EY sponsors. The final deliverables (model document, scripts, and presentation decks) are of high quality with sufficient supporting evidence and testing analysis.” - Ernst & Young

“Given the scope of the project was broad, the students did an excellent job at creating a framework of analysis for the project and determining success criteria. The compartmentalized approach to problem solving will be very helpful as we look to further enhance the modeling techniques, bench-marking performance and variable selection. The students demonstrated a lot of interest in solving a good solution to the problem, always performed above expectation, put in the extra bit of time. Team displayed elements of great problem-solving skills, as an example looking for expert opinion. Key strengths displayed include good technical skills in math/statistics, programming in python (and wrote efficient and share-able code), good analytical judgment in identifying issues and pointing them out. Simply Gray’s goals are achieved as the current solution is a good platform to continue further research on.” - Simply Gray

Practicum

Previous Corporate Sponsors include:

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