It is my great pleasure to announce the appointment of Jon Faust as the inaugural director of the Center for Financial Economics at the Johns Hopkins University.

Jon joined the Krieger School as a professor of economics in 2006 after spending nearly 20 years in the Federal Reserve System, rising to the position of assistant director in its international finance division. His appointment as director will allow us to emerge into an exciting period in which we will realize our vision for the Center for Financial Economics, an innovative venture that ultimately will offer an undergraduate major and minor and a doctoral program in financial economics. Professor Faust is an accomplished and experienced scholar, familiar with Johns Hopkins and a leader in the field of finance, who is perfectly positioned to lead the school forward in this critical endeavor.

In today's global economy, understanding the world's financial markets, institutions, policies, and the factors that influence them are essential skills. The CFE is founded on the principle that neither finance nor economics alone is sufficient to understand financial markets and to operate within them. The CFE will provide sound and rigorous training in economics and finance and demonstrate how the two facets of the economy are integrated.

As we launch the Center officially with Professor Faust's appointment, fundraising for the CFE is ongoing, and we have endowed the Carl Christ Professorship in the CFE, for which we are actively recruiting a senior scholar. The professorship honors the emeritus professor of economics who first began teaching at Johns Hopkins in 1950 and joined the faculty as a full professor in 1961. Carl is an award-winning teacher and influential scholar in the field of econometrics, having written three books and more than 100 other articles and publications. Once the Carl Christ Professor is appointed, we will begin offering a minor in financial economics. When fully funded, the Center will include four professors and will build upon core strengths in economics to propel research and provide education and training to students interested in careers in financial firms, government, academia, and more.

The recent establishment of the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins presents us with an opportunity to build a CFE that is complementary and mutually supporting. What the two will share is a commitment to enriching the fundamental education we offer students, with skills that may be applied directly upon graduation from Johns Hopkins. The ways we implement that commitment will differ, however: While the business school will engage in training across a broad variety of business fields exclusively at the master's degree level, with a mix of full- and part-time faculty and students, the CFE will be housed within the Economics Department and staffed by full-time faculty members with active research agendas in finance, and it will have a strong research mission and be focused on undergraduate and PhD programs in financial economics rather than all of business. We look forward to realizing opportunities to collaborate with the Carey School, and we welcome its new dean, Yash P. Gupta.

Professor Faust brings to the CFE not only a distinguished record of research and teaching skills, but also a clear vision for the Center and its growth. In his work in the Federal Reserve System, he directed research into both international finance and trade, and he has an ongoing advisory role with the Federal Reserve Board. He has held visiting faculty posts at Princeton University, Georgetown University, and at the Center for Applied Economics and Policy Research at Indiana University. Professor Faust is currently editor of the Berkeley Journals in Macro, associate editor of the Journal of Business Economics and Statistics, and he serves on the National Science Foundation's economics panel. He holds a BS in economics from the University of Iowa, a master's degree from Oxford University, and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Please join me in congratulating Jon on his appointment. I look forward to sharing with you in the near future more news of the CFE’s progress.

Adam F. Falk
James B. Knapp Dean