Samantha Kappagoda

Samantha Kappagoda is Chief Data Scientist and Co-Founder of Numerati^® Partners LLC, which coordinates a data analytics and technology development ecosystem, with the mission of advancing and fostering the next generation of scalable data-intensive risk and liability management enterprises.

Samantha currently serves as an Independent Director, Nominating & Governance Committee Chair and Audit Committee Member of the Credit Suisse Funds now under UBS (NYSE: UBS). She also serves on the Governing Council Business Board at the University of Toronto, a $C5 billion annual revenue public research institution.

Recognized as an Future 50 Director by the Financial Times, and a Director to Watch by Directors & Boards magazine, Samantha is a frequent speaker in the USA, Canada and UK on governance topics including AI and data strategy, cybersecurity, financial market volatility and global economic trends. Samantha’s contribution to governance discussions includes her article Board Governance of AI and Emerging Technologies in Directors & Boards, and serving as Contributor to NACD Director Essentials: Implementing AI Governance.

Samantha is a Visiting Scholar at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences NYU, advising research activities at RiskEcon^® Lab for Decision Metrics, a research lab established at Courant Institute in 2011, to foster industry/academic collaboration and develop experimental testbeds applying a range of computational and analytical methods to high-dimensional datasets from innovative sources.

Samantha has served on the American Bar Association SciTech Section as Vice-Chair of the Big Data Committee since 2022, Vice-Chair of the Internet-of-Things Committee since 2022, Vice-Chair of the Risk & Trust Committee since 2024, and Vice-Chair of the Insurance Technology and Risk Committee from 2019-2022. In 2020, she served as a technical advisor to the Uniform Law Commission Study Committee for Public Health Emergency Authorities, which studied the need for and feasibility of one or more uniform state laws addressing the authority of state governments to respond to epidemics, pandemics and other public health emergencies.

Previously, she served for over thirteen years as Senior Economist at Caxton Associates LP, a hedge fund with approximately $15 billion of assets under management, investing in global commodities, currencies, fixed income (sovereign and corporate credit) and equities. She was a key member of Caxton Global, the firm’s flagship global macro fund, where her analysis informed positioning and pricing for real-time trading decisions, and asset allocation. Her macroeconomic and demographic analytics and development of proprietary econometric models employing high frequency financial market data combined with global economic data and central bank and related policy actions, guided the firm’s senior decision makers.

Prior to working in the financial markets, Samantha was employed as an Economist in the Operations Evaluation Department at The World Bank in Washington, D.C. Her responsibilities included evaluating structural adjustment lending programs, with a primary focus on building computable general equilibrium models, in order to analyze the bank’s loan portfolio across disparate emerging market economies.

Samantha pursues broader research interests by serving as a senior editorial advisory board member of The Journal of Risk Finance (JRF), an Emerald Publications journal which provides a rigorous forum for the publication, both by academics and practitioners, of theoretical and empirical research related to the financing of risk, with a long-standing focus on issues of market convergence. She was originally the founding Managing Editor of JRF in 1999, initially published by Euromoney Institutional Investor, before its successful sale to its current publisher. She previously served as Special Editor for Risk Management, for The Journal of Alternative Investments, also an Institutional Investor journal at its inception.

Samantha received an M.B.A. in Analytic Finance and Statistics from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. She also holds an M.A. in Economics with concentrations in Industrial Organization and Monetary Economics from the University of Toronto and graduated with a B.Sc. (Honors) in Mathematics from Imperial College, London.

Samantha has over thirty cumulative years of not-for-profit board governance experience, and previously served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Girl Scouts of Greater New York (GSGNY), Council for Economic Education, Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming, and Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, and the Leadership Council of Black Rock Forest Consortium.

Her biography has been published in the Marquis’ Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in Finance and Business (formerly Who’s Who in Finance and Industry), Who’s Who of Emerging Leaders, Who’s Who of American Women, and Canadian Who’s Who (Grey House Publishing). In 2013, she was honored by the Girl Scouts of Greater New York (GSGNY) as a Woman of Distinction, for her activities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), prior to being elected to the board.