Sustainable Investing: Decarbonizing portfolios and financing green development

Satyajit Bose, PhD teaches sustainable investing, cost benefit analysis and mathematics, and serves as Associate Director of the Program in Sustainability Management. His research interests include the value of ESG information, carbon pricing, the link between portfolio investment and sustainable development in emerging markets and the optimal use of environmental performance metrics for long horizon investment choices. He is co-author (with Dong Guo and Anne Simpson) of The Financial Ecosystem: The Role of Finance in Achieving Sustainability, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. His other research is available at the Research Program on Sustainability Policy & Management at the Earth Institute.

Satyajit has extensive expertise in investment banking, asset management, financial restructuring, and automated weather risk management. Among other positions, he was a mergers & acquisitions banker, directed quantitative trading strategies at a convertible arbitrage hedge fund managing $1.5 billion in assets and developed machine learning algorithms to optimize weather-based decision tools. He served as Chief Sustainability Officer for Balbec Beauty, Inc for six years and CFO for Fred Leighton Holding Inc for two years. He received his PhD and Bachelor of Arts degrees from Columbia University.

With nearly 25 years in the utility industry, Sandy Nessing has responsibility for managing sustainability strategy, corporate stakeholder engagement and annual performance reporting for American Electric Power (AEP). She also chairs AEP’s Enterprise Sustainability Council and ESG team. She is a versatile, high-performing leader with proven success inspiring, planning, directing, implementing, and managing enterprise sustainability, cultural change, stakeholder engagement and ESG/sustainability disclosure.

Nessing leads AEP’s participation in the Electric Power Research Institute’s sustainability programs. She also serves on the Edison Electric Institute’s ESG/Sustainability Reporting Committee, which developed a groundbreaking sector specific ESG/Sustainability Reporting Template for investors. She led AEP’s participation in development of an industry template for providing large customers with GHG emissions and renewable energy data.

Nessing currently serves as President of the Board of Directors for NAEM, a national organization for environment, safety & health and sustainability professionals. In Ohio, Nessing serves as Secretary on the Franklin Park Conservatory Board of Trustees and is Executive Sponsor of the Ohio Chapter of the Women’s International Network of Utility Professionals. Prior to joining AEP in 2006, Nessing led corporate communications for Yankee Energy System and Yankee Gas Services Company, which are now Eversource. She began her career in broadcast journalism and public relations. She is a graduate of the former Briarwood College in Southington, Connecticut.

Andrew Shea is a quantitative associate in the Global Sustainable Finance group at Morgan Stanley, where he contributes to the firm’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data efforts, advances the quantitative integration of sustainability into investment products across all asset classes, and furthers the development of digital tools for sustainable investing.

Prior to joining the Firm, Shea studied at Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, earning a Master of Applied Economics (2018) and a Bachelor of Science degree in Environment and Natural Resources with an Environmental Economics specialization (2018). During his time at Ohio State, he wrote a thesis in Environmental Economics, completed a risk modeling and analytics graduate project with Huntington Bank, and was a corporate sustainability intern at Sodexo and Extended Stay America. In his free time Shea’s personal interests include water skiing, snow skiing, rock climbing, ice-climbing, cycling, surfing, wood-working, and philosophy.

Professor Paul Rose teaches Business Associations, Comparative Corporate Law, Corporate Finance, Investment Management Law, and Securities Regulation. He has written extensively on sovereign wealth funds, corporate governance, and securities regulation, and he has consulted with and provided testimony on these topics to numerous regulators and other agencies, including the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission; the Government Accountability Office; and the Congressional Research Service. He is an affiliate with the Sovereign Wealth Fund Initiative, a research project at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, a non-resident fellow of the ESADEgeo-Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics, an affiliate with IE Business School, and an affiliate with the Sovereign Investment Lab, a research project at Università Bocconi.

Prior to joining the faculty at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, Professor Rose was a visiting assistant professor in securities and finance at Northwestern University School of Law. Before joining Northwestern, Rose practiced law in the corporate and securities practice group of Covington & Burling LLP’s San Francisco office. He worked as an assistant trader in equity and emerging market derivatives at Citibank, N.A. in New York prior to attending law school.