Ryan Christiansen is the Senior Director of the Fintech Center, where he provides strategic leadership for the Center’s academic programs, industry labs, and innovation initiatives. In this role, Ryan guides the Center’s vision, oversees the development of experiential learning opportunities, and cultivates partnerships that strengthen the University’s position as a leader in fintech education and applied research. Ryan previously served as Senior Vice President of Data Access Partnerships at Mastercard. In this role, Ryan led the acquisition and management of consumer permissioned financial data. As an impassioned advocate for fintech, he played an instrumental role in the foundation of the Financial Data Exchange (FDX). His prior experience also includes serving as Senior Vice President of Private Banking at Zions Bank where he managed one of the institution’s largest credit portfolios. Across his career, Ryan has been dedicated to shaping the future of financial technology and expanding access to high-quality financial services.

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.

Peter Given is the Senior Manager of Business Development Management at the Fintech Center, where he leads industry engagement and supports the translation of fintech research into real-world applications. He focuses on building strategic partnerships that accelerate innovation, commercialization, and talent development across Utah’s fintech ecosystem. Prior to joining the Fintech Center, he served as Director of Investments at World Trade Center Utah, where he led global trade missions, international expansion strategy, and capital attraction efforts. He began his career at Goldman Sachs as an investment banking analyst and holds an MBA from American University and a BS in Economics from Florida State University.

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.

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.

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.

Gene Levinzon is the Director of the David Eccles School of Business undergraduate Fintech program where he develops and teaches Fintech courses. His areas of interests are tokenized economy and digital assets. Gene is also a faculty advisor for the Fintech Club at the University of Utah. Gene spent over 25 years working at Goldman Sachs in various roles. His recent roles included Deputy Director General overseeing the firm’s operations in Moscow (2006 – 2009) and Managing Director overseeing technology teams in Sao Paulo and Salt Lake City (2009 – 2016). Gene holds a Doctorate in Education from the University of Southern California, a Master of Business Administration in Finance and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University. He also holds a Master of Science in Computer Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Varun Shankar is a Fintech Center Associate Chair and an Assistant Professor in the Kahlert School of Computing, as well as Associate Director in the Master of Software Development (MSD) program. His research interests include scientific machine learning, scientific computing, and high-performance computing. He obtained his PhD in Computing from the University of Utah in 2014 and was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mathematics from 2014-2017. He also served as a member of the lecturing faculty in the Kahlert School of Computing from 2018-2023.

Ryan Stutsman is a Fintech Center Associate Chair and an Associate Professor in the Kahlert School of Computing, where he founded and currently leads the Scalable Computer Systems Laboratory. Dr. Stutsman received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2013. Before that, he received a bachelor’s from Purdue University in 2007. From 2013 to 2015, Dr. Stutsman worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft where the project he helped spearhead received the 2017 Microsoft Research Redmond Lab Outstanding Research Project Award. Since then, Dr. Stutsman has served as Visiting Researcher and Scholar in Residence at Microsoft and VMware Research. Dr. Stutsman’s research primarily focuses on networked data center storage systems. The work he helped lead earned the USENIX OSDI Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award and the Intel HotStorage Best Paper Award in 2022. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award (2018) and the VMware Early Career Faculty Award (2019). Dr. Stutsman’s teaching has also earned him the 2017 and 2023 Kahlert School of Computing Outstanding Teaching Award and the 2023 Price College of Engineering Outstanding Teacher Award.

Allan Landon is an Innovation Advisor for the Fintech Center. He has experience teaching business leadership and banking courses and has helped develop experiential learning programs at the David Eccles School of Business. He also directs the Utah Center for Financial Services.

Allan finished his work in 2010 as Chairman and CEO of Bank of Hawaii, based in Honolulu. Bank of Hawaii, noted for its solid financial results and community service, was Forbes Magazine’s “Best Bank in America” in 2009 and 2010. Before joining Bank of Hawaii, he was CFO of First American Bank in Nashville. Earlier he was a CPA and Partner with EY, specializing in serving community and regional banks and other financial institutions. He is a graduate of Iowa State University.