Andreea Minca

Andreea Minca is an Associate Professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University. She holds degrees from Sorbonne University (PhD in Applied Mathematics) and Ecole Polytechnique (Diplome de l'Ecole Polytechnique).

In recognition of "her fundamental research contributions to the understanding of financial instability, quantifying and managing systemic risk, and the control of interbank contagion", Andreea received the 2016 SIAM Activity Group on Financial Mathematics and Engineering Early Career Prize. This award distinguishes contributions to the mathematical modeling of financial markets and is the highest early career distinction in the field of financial engineering and mathematics. Andreea is also a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2017), a Research Fellow of the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) (2014), and an AXA Research Fund Awardee (2020). She serves on the editorial board of the SIAM Journal on Financial Mathematics.

She has held visiting appointments at Imperial College London, where she delivered the CFM-Imperial Distinguished Lectures in 2018, and at the London Business School, where she taught in the PhD program.

Research

Andreea Minca studies large systems under uncertainty, especially financial systems, and uses mathematical modeling to derive optimal policies that promote system stability. Her main work is on structural models for systemic risk, using networks to represent various types of interrelations. Her work has been published in leading Financial Mathematics and OR journals such as Mathematical Finance, Finance & Stochastics, SIAM Journal of Financial Mathematics, Operations Research and Management Science.

Her research relies on network analysis, stochastic analysis and game theory and led to a broad set of methodological advances. The study of financial contagion in large systems led to developments in the asymptotic analysis of diffusions on random graphs with inhomogeneous structures.

She pioneered the use of random graphs to model partial information about the interconnections in a financial system. She proposed a setup for optimization under uncertainty about network structure, with application to the management of financial crises.

Her work on bank runs led to the development of a theory on leverage under strategic uncertainty, when credit is provided by agents with heterogeneous beliefs. This relies on the study of equilibria of games with a large number of heterogeneous players.

Current research interests

Her current interests include financial and economic network analytics, and as well as clustering algorithms, which can be used to identify system vulnerabilities. She is interested in financial technologies , and in particular in the economic incentives and the design behind descentralized finance and stablecoins.