Fintech Fellows
Meet the researchers driving the Fintech Center's work in financial technology. Fintech Fellows is a growing network of affiliated faculty and researchers who expand the Center's research capacity, bringing new expertise and perspectives to the studies we publish.
Faculty Fellows
Faculty Fellows are current University of Utah faculty contributing research expertise alongside their teaching and departmental roles.
View Bio
Jānis Skrastiņš is an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. He is an empirical financial economist whose research examines how contractual, organizational, technological, and institutional designs shape credit markets and, in turn, how credit markets affect real economic outcomes. His work explores three core dimensions: how access to credit influences labor mobility, fertility, and mortality; how contract and organizational design affect credit allocation and capital distribution; and how financial technologies such as machine learning, instant payments, and open banking transform inclusion and competition. A secondary strand of his research investigates the role of courts and unemployment insurance in shaping resilience and risk-taking. His studies have been published in leading journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Financial Studies, and Management Science.
View Bio
Pratik Soni is an Assistant Professor in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah, where he works on theoretical and applied cryptography for improving privacy, fairness, and accountability in blockchain and machine learning systems. Prior to joining Utah, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and received his Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara. His research on zero-knowledge proofs, advanced digital signatures, and secure multi-party computation has appeared in leading venues including ACM CCS, the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P), IACR CRYPTO, IACR EUROCRYPT, IEEE FOCS, and the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS). His work has been supported by awards from Google, the Stellar Development Foundation, and Protocol Labs, as well as seed grants from the University of Utah’s Fintech Center and Office of the Vice President of Research.
Affiliated Fellows
Affiliated Fellows are researchers and academics who collaborate with the Center on specific studies and projects.
View Bio
Nathan Seegert collaborates with policymakers and businesses to further our understanding of the economy. He works on policy-relevant research in taxation, banking, public finance, organizations, and real estate. His work has been published in top academic journals such as The Quarterly Journal of Economics, The Journal of Finance, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Public Economics. He has worked on several policy projects including work on COVID-19 (with a $17.5 million grant and a $10 million project) and state tax revenues. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Harvard Business Review, CBS Moneywatch, Forbes, Bloomberg, and The Atlantic.
Nathan has been a visiting fellow with the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He previously held a position at the University of Utah and has been a member of the Utah Governor's Economic Council, an Ivory-Boyer Real Estate Center Research Fellow, and a Faculty Advisor for the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. He is currently the director of the Business and Public Policy Center.