The annual event, held on March 30 in the Aula Franceschi, celebrated faculty excellence during the 2024/25 academic year with recognition for outstanding contributions to student engagement and teaching innovation.

Clément Mazet-Sonilhac received the Innovation in Teaching Award for his course on Artificial Intelligence and Financial Intermediation. This course bridges the gap between traditional finance courses, which are focused on finance theory and applications but have limited coverage of coding techniques, and traditional data science courses. The key innovation of the course is a fully integrated blend of finance theory and hands-on sophisticated data work, implemented in weekly coding labs. Labs are directly linked to lecture content and are exploratory by design: theory is adapted on the fly based on the weekly outcomes of the coding sessions.

Matthias Rodemeier received the Innovation in Teaching Award for his work in financial markets and asset valuation. He developed an AI-powered trading application in which students trade hypothetical assets whose fundamental values change as news about firms or market conditions is revealed. Students who correctly apply the asset pricing models taught in class can identify mispriced assets and trade on that basis. A leaderboard displaying the highest-returning portfolios fosters competition and strengthens incentives for engagement with the course material.

Francesco Rotondi received the Innovation in Teaching Award for his work in quantitative finance and derivatives pricing. In particular, he was recognized for introducing a cloud-based environment for teaching Python in financial engineering applications. This approach overcame the common issues caused by library and package mismatches and facilitated collaborative learning, as students could work simultaneously and seamlessly on the same Python script without version conflicts.

We congratulate Matthias, Clément, and Francesco on this well-deserved recognition of their dedication to excellence in teaching.