Meet The Team
Meet the team powering fintech innovation and opportunity at the University of Utah’s Fintech Center. From launching new academic pathways to collaborating on real-world challenges, we are committed to helping students explore, learn, and succeed in the fast-evolving world of fintech. Through hands-on programs, supportive mentorship, and access to real-world applications, we guide students as they discover new interests, build skills, and pursue meaningful career paths.
Leadership & Staff
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As Associate Director of Fintech Center, Rose oversees the operational strategy and execution that support the Center’s academic initiatives, industry labs, and partnership development. She leads core administrative functions, ensures alignment with Center objectives, and helps manage the programs that expand student access to hands-on fintech learning opportunities.
Before joining the Center, Rose spent over 15 years as an Operations Supervisor, where she developed a strong foundation in team leadership, strategic operations, and cross-functional coordination.
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As the Administrative Assistant for the Fintech Center, Amanda plays a key role in supporting the Center’s leadership and maintaining efficient administrative operations. She has over 13 years of experience supporting leadership teams. Whether coordinating daily operations, managing complex schedules, or assisting with major initiatives, Amanda is a reliable and resourceful partner committed to excellence in every detail of her work.
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Christopher Trepel is Senior Advisor at FS Vector, where he provides analytics strategy and leadership to financial services and fintech clients, with a focus on data science execution, AI, and advanced analytics. He is also an Operating Partner at Fenway Summer Ventures, where he contributes technical expertise in analytics, credit, and consumer behavior. In parallel, Chris advises financial services, fintech, and data-intensive consumer businesses in the US and Europe, focusing on large-scale, product-grade measurement and scoring frameworks across multiple countries, enterprise data foundations and governance, predictive modeling, and decision systems. He also designs and delivers research partnerships that translate ideas into deployable solutions.
Previously, Chris was Senior Vice President, Data Science at MX Technologies, responsible for the company’s data science, analytics, BI, and customer intelligence functions. He led digital transformation work focused on integrating LLM and tokenization toolsets as well as the development of the company’s data enrichment product. Before that, he was Group Chief Science Officer at UK-based Lowell, leading both the data science function and Lowell Labs Amsterdam, an analytics center of excellence focused on advanced statistics and machine learning methods. At Lowell, he partnered with the Urban Institute to create the UK Financial Vulnerability Index.
Earlier still, Chris was Chief Scientific Officer at Encore Capital Group, where he built and directed the analytics and corporate affairs functions, launched a pioneering research platform focused on consumer financial decision making, and wrote the industry’s first Consumer Bill of Rights. During this period, he conceived and launched Debt in America, forming a public-private partnership with the Urban Institute and co-leading the inaugural research. He spent the earliest portion of his business career at Wells Fargo Bank and McKinsey & Company.
Chris holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, has completed postdoctoral fellowships in Neurophysiology and Behavioral Economics, and is lead or co-author of more than 70 academic and professional publications across five research areas. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, NPR, USA Today, and CNN Money.
Faculty Affiliates
We partner with the David Eccles School of Business, John and Marcia Price College of Engineering and S.J. Quinney College of Law to support academic programming and learning opportunities.
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Elena Asparohova is the Fintech Center Faculty Chair and a professor of Finance at the David Eccles School of Business. She received her doctorate degree in Social Sciences from the California Institute of Technology and her Master’s in Statistics from Sofia University, Bulgaria. Professor Asparouhova’s research interests are in the area of theoretical and experimental financial economics. They include but are not confined to the theory of asset pricing, experimental finance, general equilibrium theory, and econometrics.
Her recent work has been centered on the effects of competition in financial markets under delegation and under asymmetric information, information percolation in dark markets, the role of perfect forecast in multi-period markets, and market equilibration. She is also involved in experimental research on the interaction of humans and robots in financial markets. She is interested in using experimentation to test the theoretical predictions of standard models as well as to discover robust phenomena on which to build new theory, where those models’ predictions are known to be indeterminate.
Her papers have received best paper awards at the Journal of Financial Markets and the Review of Finance. Her experimental research, “Lucas in the Laboratory,” was recently awarded the best paper at the Behavioral Finance and Capital Markets Conference in Australia. Additionally, Professor Asparouhova’s research has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation for the past eight years.
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Sneha Kumar Kasera is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering and a Professor in the Kahlert School of Computing. From 1999-2003, he was a member of technical staff in the Mobile Networking Research Department of Bell Laboratories. Earlier, he received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a master’s degree in Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore.
Dr. Kasera’s research interests include computer networks and systems encompassing mobile and pervasive systems and wireless networks, network security and privacy and reliability, internet of things, crowdsourcing, and dynamic spectrum access. He is a recipient of the 2019 R&D 100 award for his work on real-time radio frequency signal detection and classification, and the 2002 Bell Labs President’s Gold Award for his contribution to wireless data research.
He has served as the program chair of IEEE WoWMoM in 2020, ACM WiSec in 2017, ACM MobiCom in 2015, and the IEEE ICNP and IEEE SECON conferences in 2011. He has also served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, ACM MC2R, ACM/Springer WINET, and Elsevier COMNET journals. Prof. Kasera started, and has been leading, the Advanced Networked Systems Research Lab at the University of Utah since 2003. He is the founding director of the Master of Software Development degree program for non-computer science majors at the University of Utah.
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