Ronald Kahn is Global Head of Scientific Equity Research at BlackRock in San Francisco. He is responsible for upholding and enhancing BlackRock’s research standards. He also chairs BlackRock’s Global and US Proxy Committees.

He is a well-known expert on portfolio management, risk modeling, and quantitative analysis. He was Director of Research at Barra for many years, and ran the Barra Research Seminars. He has published numerous articles on investment management, and has written (with Richard Grinold) the influential book Active Portfolio Management: Quantitative Theory and Applications. He is a 2007 winner of the Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy award for best article in the Journal of Portfolio Management. He is on the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of Portfolio Management, the Financial Analysts Journal, and the Journal of Investment Consulting. The 2007 book, How I Became a Quant, includes his essay describing his transition from physics to finance.

He teaches the equities half of the course, “International Equity and Currency Markets” (MFE 230G) in UC Berkeley’s Master of Financial Engineering Program.

He received an AB in Physics, summa cum laude, from Princeton University in 1978, and a PhD in Physics from Harvard University in 1985. He won an AAAS Mass Media Science Fellowship at Newsweek during the summer of 1983.

His other activities include membership on the Board of Trustees of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, the Advisory Board of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth, and the boards of the French-American International School and Jewish Family & Children’s Services.