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 also co-leads research activities at 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.

She currently serves as Vice-Chair of the American Bar Association Insurance Technology and Risk (SciTech) Committee. In 2020, she was appointed at inception as a technical advisor to the Uniform Law Commission Study 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, 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 is an active alumnus of the University of Toronto, currently on the Lester B. Pearson International Scholarship committee. Since 2014, she has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Girl Scouts of Greater New York (GSGNY), 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.

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).

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