Professor Kalok CHAN , City University of Hong Kong 

Professor Kalok Chan is Chair Professor of Finance at City University of Hong Kong.  He served as the Dean of College of Business from November 2023 to May 2025. Prior to joining CityU in November 2023, Professor Chan was the Wei Lun Professor of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, serving as Dean of CUHK Business School from 2014 to 2019 and Chairman of the Department of Finance from 2021 to 2023.Before that he worked as the Synergis-Geoffrey Yeh Professor of Finance at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he served as the Head of Finance Department (2003-2013) and Acting Dean of HKUST Business School (2013-14). He was the Founding Director of the HKUST-NYU Stern Joint Master in Global Finance programme. Prior to joining HKUST, he was an Associate Professor of Finance at Arizona State University.Professor Chan obtained his BSSc in Economics from CUHK, and PhD in Finance from Ohio State University. As a leading scholar and a prominent researcher, he has published in numerous top ranked finance journals, and has been ranked as the top finance researcher in the Asia-Pacific region. His research interests focus on dynamics of asset prices, derivatives, market micro-structure, and international financial markets.Active on several public bodies in Hong Kong, Professor Chan is a past President of the Asian Finance Association, and currently serves on a number of committees including the Human Capital Committee of HK Financial Services and Development Council, TraHK Supervisory Committee, Hong Kong Academy of Finance and HKIMR Council of Advisers for Applied Research.

Professor Paresh Narayan(Guest Editor, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal) , Monash University 

Paresh Kumar Narayan is a Professor at Monash Business School. He is the President of the Asia-Pacific Applied Economics Association, Editor-in-Chief of Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, and Managing Editor of Bulletin of Monetary Economics and Banking. Paresh is also a Distinguished Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, and an adjunct Professor in several universities around the world.

Paresh’s research interests are in Applied Econometrics and Financial Markets. He has published over 380 papers in international refereed journals and has the distinguished title of a high cited researcher over 5 consecutive years (2017-2021), with an h-index of 88. He is ranked 544 by Stanford University amongst 9 million researchers globally.

Professor Narayan is a consultant to multiple organisations, including, Bank Indonesia, Central Bank of Sri Lanka, Asian Development Bank, Development Bank Institute, Commonwealth Secretariat, AusAID, South Pacific Commission, Forum Secretariat, UNDP, ILO, Solomon Island National Provident Fund, Central Bank of Solomon Islands, USP, and, Economic Research Institute of ASEAN (ERIA).

Professor John WEI , The Hong Kong Polytechnic University 

Professor Wei is best known for his extensive research on the cross-section of stock returns in the U.S. and international markets. He has discovered some new and important anomalies associated with cross-sectional return predictability and have first introduced "individualism" to the empirical asset pricing literature. Four of these papers have been cited by 2013 Economic Nobel Prize Laureate, Eugene Fama, and his co-author, Kenneth French. Most of his papers are well cited. Many of his papers are associated with the foundation of those factors in the Fama and French (2015) five-factor.

Professor Sabri Boubaker, EM Normandie

Sabri Boubaker is a Professor of Finance at EM Normandie Business School (Paris, France) and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Financial Management & Accounting (Wiley; Impact Factor 8.2; CiteScore 12.5). He received the 2022 Economic Research Foundation’s Research Award (Centrum för Forskning om Ekonomiska Relationer, Sweden) and the Best Corporate Finance Paper Award at the 2023 Asian Finance Conference. Professor Boubaker has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in major international journals (e.g., Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Banking & Finance, Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Business Ethics, and British Journal of Management). He has edited 12 books with major publishers and coordinated numerous special issues in leading journals. He serves on multiple editorial boards, is President of the International Society for the Advancement of Financial Economics (ISAFE), and co-founded and co-chairs several high-profile annual conferences (PFMC, ICBFS, VSBF, etc.).