Jan Bena is an Associate Professor of Finance at UBC Sauder School of Business. He earned his Ph.D. in finance from the London School of Economics (LSE) after an entrepreneurial stint and doctoral studies in economics at CERGE-EI, Prague. Since joining UBC Sauder in 2009, Jan has served as the Chair of the Finance Division and directed the Ph.D. program (2017–2020). He also held leadership roles with the Northern Finance Association (NFA), including Program Chair (2019) and President.Jan’s research focuses on corporate R&D, private equity, entrepreneurship, decentralized finance (DeFi), and finance-industrial organization intersections. His work has appeared in top-tier journals like Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. He is an Associate Editor at the Review of Corporate Finance Studies and a frequent referee for leading journals. Jan has received over 30 awards and grants, including the FMA Best Paper Award (2023) and the CSEF/UniCredit Foundation Best Paper Award (2022, 2023). He has presented at more than 200 seminars globally.Jan teaches across multiple UBC programs (BCom, MM, MBA, Ph.D., BIE) and emphasizes real-world applications of finance theory. In 2021, he was honored with the UBC Sauder Alumni Talking Stick Award for pedagogical innovation. He previously taught at Donau-Universität Krems, Austria (2011-2015), and served as a Tutorial Fellow at LSE.