Finance Research Practicum

Gita Rao is a Senior Lecturer in Finance, and Associate Faculty Director of the Master of Finance program at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She joined the MIT Sloan finance faculty after over two decades of experience in global investing, asset allocation, risk management, and client service. She has managed the first global ESG portfolio in the United States, developed and teaches a course on impact investing at MIT Sloan, and is faculty director for the MIT Sloan Impact Investing Initiative. Ms. Rao has been a portfolio manager responsible for over $15 billion in assets and director of quantitative equity research at two major investment firms: MFS Investment Management and Wellington Management Company, both in Boston. Prior to managing portfolios, she was a senior research analyst at Fidelity Management & Research Company and vice president at Kidder, Peabody & Co. in New York. She has published in the Review of Accounting Studies and appeared in media including Foreign Affairs, Bloomberg and CNN among others.Dr. Rao has been a president of the Society of Quantitative Analysts, on the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal, on the board of trustees of the Research Foundation of the CFA Institute, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a PhD in finance from the University of Rochester, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and a BA in economics (Honors) from Delhi University’s St. Stephen’s College in India. She was born in New Delhi, India and lives in Brookline, MA.