Professor of Finance in the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of New Orleans. He currently holds three endowed Chairs – Hibernia Professor of Economics and Finance, Hancock Whitney Chair Professor in Business, and Bank One Professor in Business – at the University of New Orleans. He is the winner of the 2016 Islamic Development Bank (IDB) Prize in Islamic Banking and Finance and received his BA in Economics and Mathematics from Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota, USA, and M.A. in Economics and Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA respectively. For his outstanding research and scholarly work, he has been recognized with the “Lifetime Achievement Award” by the United Nations org. Research Council in 2019. He visited many international universities as Distinguished Visiting Professor and has over 350 papers published as book chapters and in top refereed academic journals.