Philip Howard

I am an assistant professor of finance at Wake Forest University's School of Business and the Joseph M. Bryan Fellow in Banking and Finance. I am a senior research associate at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, where I am the lead quantitative analyst for the Active Management Research Alliance. In addition, I am a research associate at Wake Forest School of Medicine's Center for Artificial Intelligence Research.

My research spans international finance, monetary policy, alternative investments, computational economics, and applied AI analytics. My research has been presented at conferences including the AEA, AFA, CICF, FMA, NBER, and WFA and published in the American Economic Review and the Review of Financial Studies.  It has also been featured in Bloomberg, Risk.net, and Yahoo! Finance and received the 2019–2020 Unigestion Alternative Risk Premia research award.

At Wake Forest I teach Quantitative Finance in the undergraduate finance program and Financial Analytics in the Master of Science in Business Analytics program. Beginning in Spring 2027, I will also teach Applied AI for Advanced Analytics in the MSBA program. I am the 2018-2019 recipient of the T.B. Rose Fellowship in Business Teaching Award for pedagogical innovation. I serve as the faculty advisor and program director to the Wake Forest University Actuarial Science Certificate. In 2022-2023, I served on the Core Planning Team to help craft the university's strategic framework for its next century.

I received a PhD in finance from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I earned a master's degree in Statistics and Operations Research and a bachelor's of science degree with highest honors in Mathematical Decision Sciences from the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at UNC-Chapel Hill. Prior to graduate school, I worked as an actuary at Cigna.