The three-member Management Board of the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE is changing: Loriana Pelizzon, Director of SAFE’s Financial Markets Research Department, will replace Uwe Walz as of 1 October 2023. Pelizzon will act as Deputy Scientific Director of the institute alongside Scientific Director Florian Heider and Muriel Büsser as Administrative Director.
“Together with my predecessor Jan Pieter Krahnen, Uwe Walz played a key role in ensuring that SAFE was established in Frankfurt in the first place and that it continued to operate independently as a Leibniz Institute from 2020 on,” says Florian Heider. “As one of the institute’s founding members, it is thanks to him that SAFE is so successfully positioned today, both scientifically and organizationally. Uwe Walz has always been a guiding light and a highly valued colleague for the entire team. I am very pleased that he will continue to be closely associated with the institute as a bridge professor,” adds Heider.
Loriana Pelizzon, who now joins the Board, is a highly renowned researcher who has been a core institute member for many years: “I look forward to developing SAFE further in my function as a Management Board member in the coming years. By joining the Leibniz Association, we now have the long-term perspective to permanently establish ourselves as a leading international research center in finance”. SAFE’s Department Directors elect the Deputy Scientific Director, who is appointed by the institute’s Board of Trustees.
Pelizzon and Walz are part of the SAFE core team
In 2013, Pelizzon became the first professor to accept a call to join the newly established LOEWE Center SAFE at Goethe University Frankfurt. She is also affiliated with the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and last year, was a visiting professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, USA. Pelizzon currently acts as Co-Vice President of the Advisory Scientific Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) and is a research fellow at the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Her research interests include systemic and sovereign risk, hedge funds, market microstructure, and financial crises.
Before joining Goethe University Frankfurt in October 2002 as a Professor of Economics specializing in Industrial Economics, Uwe Walz taught and conducted research at the Universities of Bochum and Tübingen. He has been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, USA. In 2010, he became co-director of the Center for Financial Studies, which in 2013, together with Goethe University, received funding for the LOEWE Center SAFE, the predecessor of today’s Leibniz Institute. Since the founding of SAFE, Walz has been a member of the SAFE Management Board with Jan Pieter Krahnen.
The Management Board is responsible for the strategic management of the institute. It is responsible for research performance and direction, research program planning, and financial planning, and reports to the institute’s Board of Trustees and Research Advisory Council.
Scientific Contact
Prof. Loriana Pelizzon, Ph.D.
Deputy Scientific Director, Director Research Department "Financial Markets"
