Professor Raghavendra Rau

Founder and Academic Director of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) 

MBA (IIM Bangalore), MSc, PhD (INSEAD)

Professor Rau's research interests include how investors and firms acquire and use information. He holds the Gresham Chair in Business at Gresham college in London. He has held the Ambank Chair in Financial Services at the Universiti Malaya and was awarded a honorary professorship at the University of Jordan in 2024. He is also the incoming president of the Financial Management Association, a past president of the European Finance Association and was previously Principal at Barclays Global Investors, then the largest asset manager in the world, in San Francisco. He also is a past editor of Financial Management. Raghavendra Rau is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Corporate Finance and the Journal of Banking and Finance, among others. In 2015, he won the Ig Nobel prize in Management for his paper 'What does not kill you only makes you more risk-loving: Early Life disasters and CEO behavior", a prize that makes people laugh and then think.

Professor Rau is a member of the Finance subject group at Cambridge Judge Business School, which focuses on the investment and financial decisions of firms and institutions.