Samantha Kappagoda

Samantha Kappagoda is Co-Managing Member 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.

The firm provides resources fundamental to advancing the development of nascent leading-edge inferential surveillance, monitoring, and predictive analytics technologies for deployment within the RiskTech domain: risk technologies associated with adaptive distributed, networked and embedded systems such as remote sensing, agent-oriented data analytics, computing and control systems. Numerati^® Partners curates integrated  RiskTech solutions as well as forensic and use-case applications in RiskTech sub-domains including LitTech, RegTech, FinTech and InsurTech (litigation technology, regulation technology, financial technology and insurance technology).

Samantha Kappagoda is also Co-Lead Investigator at the RiskEcon^® Lab for Decision Metrics @ Courant Institute of Mathematical Science NYU, established in 2011, focusing primarily on research and development (R&D) of remote and compressed sensing, anomaly detection, forensic analytics and statistical process control. She is also a Visiting Scholar at Courant Institute, and associated with the Social Media and Political Participation Lab (SMaPP) at NYU, an interdisciplinary collaboration that investigates the relationships between social media and political behavior.

She currently serves as Vice-Chair of the American Bar Association Insurance Technology and Risk Committee. She has also recently been appointed to the Uniform Law Commission’s newly-formed Committee for Public Health Emergency Authorities, which studies 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, Samantha was Senior Economist at Caxton Associates, a hedge fund established in 1983, investing in global fixed income, currencies, commodities and equities. She was a key member of Caxton Global, the firm’s flagship global macro fund, which, at peak, had approximately $12 billion of assets under management. Her macroeconomic and demographic analytics and development of proprietary econometric models of financial markets, the global economy, central bank and related policy actions guided the firm’s senior decision makers during her thirteen-year tenure there.

Prior to working in the financial markets, Samantha was an Economist in the Operations Evaluation Department of the World Bank in Washington, D.C., focusing on building computable general equilibrium models, in order to analyze the bank’s loan portfolio across emerging market countries.

Samantha pursues her 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 has also served as Special Editor for Risk Management, for The Journal of Alternative Investments, another Institutional Investor journal.

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.

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).

Subsequent to being honored by the Girl Scouts of Greater New York, she has served on their Board of Directors, focusing on the GSGNY portfolio of STEM programs. She is also a member of the leadership council of Black Rock Forest Consortium, a 4,000-acre natural living laboratory for field-based scientific research and education, operated by a consortium of twenty-three colleges and universities, public and independent schools, and scientific and cultural institutions. She previously served on the Board of Directors of Council for Economic Education, Glynwood, and Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival.

Samantha has lived and worked in New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., Toronto, Ottawa and London, and has also lived in Singapore, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.