Alok Kumar becomes the University of Miami School of Business Administration’s first Gabelli Asset Management Professor.

Alok Kumar has been named the first Gabelli Asset Management Professor, thanks to a generous endowment from New York financial executive Mario Gabelli.

Prior to joining the School of Business Administration, Kumar was an associate professor of finance for four years at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in behavioral finance, empirical asset pricing, corporate finance, and computational economics. His work has been widely quoted in the media.

Gabelli, a longtime supporter of the school, is the chairman and CEO of GAMCO Investors, a New York City-based provider of advice on alternative investing, mutual funds, institutions, and high-net worth investors.

In addition to the Finance Professorship, GAMCO has supported the school’s academic initiatives, conferences, scholarship programs, mentoring, and job placement initiatives. Since Gabelli founded the firm in 1977 as an institutional broker-dealer, it has grown into a widely recognized financial services corporation.

“Endowed professorships are critical to our strategy,” said Frances Aldrich Seville-Sacasas, interim dean at the time of the endowment. “They provide us with vital support for our faculty, research, and service initiatives.”