Speakers' Biographies
(2023)

Christoph Meinerding is a Senior Economist at the Research Centre of the Deutsche Bundesbank. Christoph holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Muenster, Germany. Prior to joining the Bundesbank, he was an Assistant Professor at the Finance Department at Goethe University Frankfurt and at the research institute SAFE. His research covers a broad range of topics including climate economics, green finance, empirical and theoretical asset pricing, dynamic asset allocation, network and contagion effects on financial markets, and macrofinance. It has been published in leading academic journals such as the Review of Financial Studies, the Review of Finance, and Management Science. Christoph’s recent policy work centers around climate economics and green finance as well. For instance, he has been a member of the workstream on climate change of the ECB strategy review in 2021, and he is currently co-coordinator of the ESCB Research Cluster Climate Change.

Maarten van Rooij is Principal Economist working at the Economics & Research Division of De Nederlandsche Bank (the Dutch central bank), where he is contact person for activities at the Bank related to the DNB Household Survey (DHS). He is affiliated to Netspar (Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement) and member of the Netspar Editorial Board. He holds a PhD in economics from Utrecht University. He works on topics related to household behavior and financial decision-making, such as financial literacy, retirement planning, mortgage and housing market, the stock market, trust and inflation expectations. His work has been published in Journal of Financial Economics, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Economic Journal, European Economic Review, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Economic Psychology, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, International Journal of Central Banking, Journal of Banking and Finance, and others.

Teodora Paligorova is Principal Economist at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC. Her fields of research are financial intermediation, banking, and corporate finance. She has studied extensively the transmission of monetary policy through banks both domestically and internationally.  Her recent work focuses on the interaction of bank and nonbank lending, and bank interest rate risk management. Teodora received PhD in Economics from CERGE-EI, Prague in 2008. Before joining the Federal Reserve Board in 2017 she worked at the Bank of Canada as a Senior Economist.

Sudipto Karmakar is a Research and Policy Adviser in the Financial Stability Directorate of the Bank of England and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the King’s College London. He is a macroeconomist with an interest in macroprudential policy, real-financial sector linkages and issues related to corporate investment and productivity. He has extensive experience in working with DSGE models and large-scale micro datasets. Before joining the Bank of England, Sudipto worked as an Economist in the research department of the Bank of Portugal and as a Technical Adviser and a Visiting Researcher at the Bank for International Settlements. Sudipto has a PhD in Economics from Boston University, an MSc in Economics from the University of Calcutta and a BSc in Economics from Presidency College, Kolkata.

Laura Noonan is a financial regulation editor at the Financial Times, covering global financial regulation and policy developments across banks, assets managers, hedge funds and other parts of the financial services industry. 

She has previously reported from New York as the FT's US banking editor, from London and Dublin as the FT's global investment banking correspondent, from across Europe covering the eurozone banking crisis for Reuters, and from Dublin covering the Irish crisis for the Irish Independent. She holds a BA in Journalism from DCU and has passed all three levels of the Chartered Financial Analyst exams. 

Edward Twiddy is a co-founder of Atom and the bank’s Director for Environment, Society and Government. He is a Durham alumni – bachelor’s degree 1988-91 and then PhD 1992-95. He has worked on settling international boundary disputes, sea level changes in the Thames Estuary, humanitarian aid and land mine mapping in Northern Iraq with the UN, and spent over a decade at HM Treasury including spells back in Iraq and tidying up Northern Rock. He came back to the North East in 2012 to run the North East LEP and founded Atom in 2014. He also holds LLM in Public International Law, is dedicated to rivers and cricket and lives with his family in Durham City.

Andrea Zazzarelli joined Fathom in 2017 as Technical Director, bringing his quantitative expertise to Fathom’s core research areas of macro, finance and political analysis.

Andrea has nearly 20 years of experience having worked across a broad spectrum of buy- and sell-side institutions, such as the BT Pension Scheme, EFGAM, Moody’s and the United Nations.

His areas of expertise include; cross-asset tactical and strategic allocation models, as well as economic and market research within equity and fixed-income markets, machine learning and geopolitical forecasting.

At Fathom, Andrea has developed a number of proprietary financial market indicators, including the Fathom Leading Indicator (FLI), a measure of expected macro conditions; the Fathom Liquidity Indicator (FLiq), a timely assessment of financial market liquidity risk; and the Fathom Risk-Off Gauge (FROG), a tactical asset allocation signal.

David McCarthy has over 30 years of experience in finance within retail banks and building societies in Bank of Ireland, Britannia and CoOP.  His professional interests include strategic development and balance sheet management.

More recently he has focused on challenger banks.  He was a co-founder and CFO of Atom Bank - the UK’s first purely digital bank.  Recently he joined Tandem as CFO; Tandem’s mission is to help consumers with the green transition.

A fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and an associate member of the Association of Corporate Treasurers, David graduated in Geography from the University of Bristol.