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Keith Black has over twenty-five years of financial market experience, serving approximately half of that time as an academic and half as a trader and consultant to institutional investors. He currently serves as Managing Director of Curriculum and Exams for the CAIA Association. During his most recent role at Ennis Knupp + Associates, Keith advised foundations, endowments and pension funds on their asset allocation and manager selection strategies in hedge funds, commodities, and managed futures. Prior experience includes commodities derivatives trading, stock options research and CBOE floor trading, and building quantitative stock selection models for mutual funds and hedge funds. Dr. Black previously served as an assistant professor and senior lecturer at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He contributes regularly to The CFA Digest, and has published in The Journal of Wealth Management, The Journal of Trading, The Journal of Investing, and The Journal of Alternatives Investments, among others. He is the author of the book “Managing a Hedge Fund,” as well as co-author of the 2012 and 2015/2016 second and third editions of the CAIA Level I and Level II textbooks. Dr. Black was named to the Institutional Investor magazine’s list of “Rising Stars of Hedge Funds” in 2010. Dr. Black earned a BA from Whittier College, an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, and a PhD from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He has earned the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation and was a member of the inaugural class of the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) candidates.

Steven Kaplan is the Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Thomas Cole Distinguished Visiting Professor Chair at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Kaplan is also the Kessenich E.P. Faculty Director of the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Professor Kaplan is one of the world’s top researchers on private equity, venture capital, corporate governance, executive talent and income inequality. His papers on private equity and venture capital are the standard references in the field. He has testified to U.S. Senate and U.S. House Committees about his research. He ranks among the top 60 in paper downloads and in paper citations (out of over 280,000 authors) on SSRN (Social Science Research Network). He is the co-creator of the Kaplan-Schoar PME (Public Market Equivalent) private equity benchmarking approach. A Fortune Magazine article referred to him as "probably the foremost private equity scholar in the galaxy.” A JP Morgan report called him “the patron saint of private equity research.” His findings and opinions regularly appear in the business media. Professor Kaplan is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Kaplan teaches advanced MBA, law and executive courses in entrepreneurial finance and private equity, corporate financial management, corporate governance, and wealth management. His course in entrepreneurial finance and private equity is consistently among the most popular in the school. BusinessWeek named him one of the top twelve business school teachers in the country and one of the top four teachers of entrepreneurship. Professor Kaplan has been awarded the Phoenix Award four times and the Arthur Kelly Prize twice for exhibiting exceptional dedication to his students outside of the classroom. Professor Kaplan serves on the boards of Morningstar (MORN) and Z