Chicago File: Competition Among Exchanges Speakers: Gorham

Dr. Gorham joined the Illinois Institute of Technology as the Director of the IIT Center for Financial Markets in July 2004.  The Center offers MS degrees in Finance, Financial Markets, and Mathematical Finance.  In addition, he currently serves on the board of directors for two exchanges -- the CBOE Futures Exchange and the National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange of India.   He also serves on the National Futures Association’s Business Conduct Committee, the editorial board of the GARP Risk Review, and the editorial board of Futures Industry.  He is regional director of the Global Association of Risk Professionals for Chicago.  He formerly served as Managing Editor of the Journal of Global Financial Markets.

Prior to IIT, Dr. Gorham served as the first director of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s new Division of Market Oversight, a division of 100 economists, lawyers, futures trading specialists and others dedicated to the oversight of the nation’s 12 futures exchanges.  Before the CFTC, he worked in two key financial institutions: for four years as a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and for 18 years at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where he was vice president in the areas of product development and international marketing.

He has been involved with projects to create a stock index futures market in India, evaluate the feasibility of Parmesan cheese futures in Italy, and to modernize financial markets in Egypt.  He has written over fifty articles for newspapers, journals and magazines in five countries and given talks on derivatives in 13 countries.  He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, Africa.  He holds a BA in English literature from the University of Notre Dame, an MS in food and resource economics from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the University of Wisconsin.