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The Financial Management Association International (FMA) has selected Rice Business professor Kerry Back as the recipient of its Innovation in Teaching Award. The honor recognizes outstanding teaching techniques in finance, emphasizing innovation, broad transferability and measurable impact on students, institutions and the profession.

Back was selected for his work in building an MBA course, Generative AI in Finance, which trains students to apply artificial intelligence and coding to finance.

“I view the role of the course as threefold,” Back said. “I want to show students how to use new tools for financial analysis; to show them the ways in which generative AI is implemented in and impacting the finance industry; and to deepen students’ understanding of core finance and related topics.”

“Kerry Back’s selection underscores the exceptional caliber of our faculty,” said Peter Rodriguez, dean of Rice Business, which includes the Jones Graduate School of Business and the Virani Undergraduate School of Business. “Kerry consistently pushes the boundaries of how we teach finance — making concepts come alive and preparing students for successful careers.”

In addition to a talk regarding the course for which he won the award, Back gave a tutorial lecture to several hundred finance professors from around the world on "Integrating AI Into Teaching."

Back’s award places Rice Business among a select group of institutions recognized for innovation in finance pedagogy. With this latest recognition, Rice Business has now secured the FMA Innovation in Teaching Award twice in the last three years — Back and Kevin Crotty were honored in 2023 for their Learn Investments @ Rice Business, which they created to support courses in introductory finance, applied finance, investments, options and futures, fixed income, portfolio management and data-driven finance.

In addition to the national recognition and cash prize outlined by FMA, Back’s work will be featured in the FMA conference program and accompanying materials, giving visibility not only to the individual instructor but also to his impact in teaching innovation in finance.

The Virani Undergraduate School of Business at Rice University celebrated its one-year anniversary on October 29, with coffee and breakfast for its students as they made their way to class. The undergraduate program is named after Houston business and community leaders Farid and Asha Virani ’89 thanks to their historic gift in 2024.

“This gift empowers our undergraduates to move beyond theory and step boldly into the real world,” said Bob Dittmar, the Houston Endowment Professor of Finance and associate dean of the Virani Undergraduate School of Business. “It opens doors to internships, research and experiences that shape confident, capable leaders — not someday but right now. We are deeply grateful for the Viranis’ investment in our students’ potential and in the future they will help build.”

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More than 360 undergraduate students are currently declared as business majors at Rice and more than 1,200 are enrolled in business courses. Rice Business leadership is supporting ongoing growth in the number of business majors by advancing opportunities in areas like energy transition, artificial intelligence, nonprofits benefiting society at large, health care reform and the revitalization of urban communities. Those opportunities are already taking shape for the Class of 2024 with 92% of Rice undergraduate business majors finding their postgraduate paths within six months of graduation. 

The business major was designed to enable the next generation of business leaders with a well-rounded and in-depth foundation in business fundamentals. The employers of the 2024 undergraduate business graduates include AT&T, the Houston Rockets, GE HealthCare, Capital One and more. 

Virani students learn from the same top-notch faculty who teach the Jones Graduate School of Business MBA programs. The tight-knit community means that professors are open to work one-on-one with various research projects, and students can learn from each other as they tackle internships and externships. 

In 2024, the Viranis made a generous philanthropic gift to the business program, igniting a new era of opportunity for students. This gift supports undergraduate curriculum development and delivery, cocurricular opportunities and other resources to support undergraduate career readiness and academic success.

“The Virani Undergraduate School of Business prepares students with rigorous scholarship, real-world immersion and leadership readiness opportunities,” Rice Business Dean Peter Rodriguez said. “We are charting an extraordinary future, not just for the school but for the future leaders who study here.”

Rice Business’ new 112,000-square-foot building is set to open in 2026 with additional event space and features new, larger classrooms primarily to support the growth of the Virani Undergraduate School of Business as enrollment continues to grow year over year.

Now in its 26th year, the Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC) presented by Rice Business has officially opened applications and is calling on the next generation of world-changing graduate student founders to compete on the global stage. This is where tomorrow’s industry leaders get their start.

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Hosted and organized by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, the RBPC is widely regarded as the world’s largest and richest intercollegiate graduate student startup competition. Over the course of three days, teams pitch to investors, receive mentorship and compete for more than $1 million in prizes. Since its inception, RBPC alumni have raised more than $6 billion in funding, transforming ideas presented early at Rice into thriving ventures making global impact.

Application deadline: Jan. 31, 2026
Competition dates: April 9-11, 2026 | Rice University, Houston

Rice Business — home to the nation’s No. 1 graduate entrepreneurship program for six consecutive years — is a cornerstone of Houston’s rapidly evolving innovation ecosystem. As the global headquarters for the energy and industrial economy, Houston provides a backdrop for the RBPC, where capital, talent and technology converge.

Each spring, the RBPC draws the brightest entrepreneurial talent from universities worldwide to Rice’s innovation hub and to campus in the heart of Houston. Here, collaboration, investment and cross-university connections strengthen both Rice’s leadership in entrepreneurship education and Houston’s growing role as a global innovation city.

Graduate student-led startups from any university are encouraged to apply by Jan. 31, 2026, at rbpc.rice.edu.

To help prospective teams prepare their strongest applications, the Rice Alliance will host virtual information sessions Nov. 13 and Dec. 11. These sessions will offer insights into the application process, eligibility requirements and what to expect during competition weekend.

Teams are initially eligible for the 2026 RBPC if their startup:

• Includes at least two current students with at least one graduate student in any field of study.
• Is fundraising or seeking investment within the next 12 months.
• Is developing a startup in one of the following sectors: energy; clean tech and      sustainability; life science and health care solutions; hard tech; digital enterprise; consumer products and services.

For more than 25 years, the RBPC has been the launchpad for founders at the beginning of their journey. The competition does more than award funding — it helps founders accelerate traction, gain visibility, refine strategy and build relationships with investors and corporate leaders who can open real pathways to scale. Graduate student-led teams who are building enduring companies, redefining industries and developing bold solutions to the world’s biggest challenges are encouraged to apply.

Based on research by Jefferson Duarte (Rice Business), Christopher S. Jones (University of Southern California), Mehdi Khorram (Iowa State), Haitao Mo (University of Kansas), Junbo L. Wang (Louisiana State)

Key findings:

• Many “can’t miss” option-based trading strategies examined in academic research look impressive on paper because they rely on future data — something no real investor can actually use.
• Once the time-traveling data is removed, those sky-high returns shrink and the risks start to show.
• The pressure to publish big results may help explain why those mistakes were made in the first place.
   

If something seems “too good to be true,” it probably is — and this old axiom is amplified when money is on the line. 

According to new research by Jefferson Duarte, the Gerald D. Hines Associate Professor of Real Estate Finance at Rice Business, investors should be skeptical of investment strategies that promise big returns with little risk — even when they’re published in academic journals.

We all know the sordid tale of Bernie Madoff. The former New York City asset manager lured investors returns that appeared to far outpace the market. For years, he attracted a steady stream of clients with a seemingly flawless performance record. In reality, investor withdrawals were paid using money from new deposits. When the 2008 financial crisis shook markets, Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme collapsed. Investors rushed to withdraw funds, but there wasn’t enough cash to go around.

Unfortunately, unrealistic performance claims aren’t limited to bad actors like Madoff. Even some peer-reviewed finance papers describe strategies with returns that appear implausibly high.

For an article forthcoming in The Review of Financial Studies, Duarte and his co-authors dug into the details of several influential empirical options papers. And when they tried to replicate their results, they couldn’t. The authorship team found that the option-trading strategies proposed in these papers exhibited “look-ahead bias” — a statistical error that arises when researchers use information that would not have been available when the trading decisions were actually made. 

“When we eliminated the intraday data from the analysis, the returns were much smaller, and the level of risk also increased. These were not extremely good deals anymore.” 

In layman’s terms, the options trading papers used future data — for example, the average price of a stock or option over the course of a day — to make trading decisions that were supposed to happen at the start of that same day. That’s a problem because, in real life, traders don’t know what the average price will be until the day is over.

So, the authors of these influential empirical options papers were effectively “looking ahead,” using information from the future to make their predictions. This made the results appear far stronger than they would be in reality — essentially giving the strategies an unfair, time-traveling advantage.

One influential study published several years ago claimed that a simple options-based approach could generate astonishing daily mean returns of more than 3%. The strategy involved buying and selling call options — contracts that give investors the right to purchase a stock at a specified price.

To decide which call options to trade, the researchers used filters based on liquidity — how easily a contract can be bought or sold without affecting its price. But their method relied on each contract’s average price over the entire trading day to make selections at the start of that same day — using information that wouldn’t actually be known until after markets closed. When Duarte and his co-authors replicated the strategy using only information available at the start of the trading day, the returns proved far more modest. 

“Just imagine profiting a few percentage points per day,” says Duarte. “If you could do that every day for years, you would have a money wealth machine. But in practice, you would need a crystal ball to do this. When we eliminated the intraday data from the analysis, the returns were much smaller, and the level of risk also increased. These were not extremely good deals anymore.” 

But why was a paper with such a significant error published in the first place? Publication bias within academia could have contributed. Academic journals favor research that has very strong results, and this can nudge authors to find ways to make their results look stronger than they actually are. 

Simply put, if a proposed options-trading strategy did not generate exceptionally high returns, it might never have been published. But a strategy showing smooth gains averaging more than 3% per day is bound to attact attention — even if it isn’t actually feasible. 

Duarte’s research examined only three options papers, and he believes there may be more cases of look-ahead bias in the empirical options literature. One concrete way researchers can improve on this is to provide a clear, detailed description of their methods so others can replicate the results. 

To reproduce the findings in one study, Duarte and his co-authors had to test 190 different procedures just to figure out how the sample had been selected. If published papers were easier to replicate, he says, it would be far simpler to detect look-ahead biases in the first place. 

Duarte also argues that researchers should exercise restraint when selecting their sample. While the use of filters is common in options research and can help remove data errors, they also create opportunities for mistakes — such as look-ahead bias — to slip in.

And if any options strategy appears to outperform the market by a wide margin, it should invite additional scrutiny. Exceptional risk-adjusted returns may signal that an error in the empirical analysis has gone unnoticed.

“When you talk to practitioners — people that actually implement these option strategies,” Duarte says, “they will tell you that these high risk-adjusted returns simply can’t happen on a consistent basis. When they try to replicate a strategy like this, they can’t do it either.”

Written by Ty Burke

Duarte, et al (2025). “Too Good to Be True: Look-ahead Bias in Empirical Options Research,” forthcoming in The Review of Financial Studies. 

If you spend enough time on campus, you start to realize business school isn’t a place so much as a network in motion. It moves through classrooms, coffee chats and long nights of group work. The peers sitting next to you in class, the alumni a few years ahead of you and the professionals you meet through events and internships — all of these people and moments form the network that will shape your career long after graduation.

Networking has a reputation for being transactional, but it’s really about curiosity — about paying attention to people and what they care about. The good news is, you can practice that every day. 

Here are some tips to keep in mind.

1. Lead With Presence

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Janet Moore, senior lecturer and director of the Rice Business communication program, says that effective networking begins with how you show up. Preparation, attention and respect all communicate confidence.

“Confidence, not arrogance, is a key element of executive presence. Effective networkers exude executive presence while also communicating interest in others,” she says. “People remember how you make them feel — so focus on listening as much as you speak.”

That means preparing before events, asking thoughtful questions and showing genuine interest in others’ experiences. Presence also includes nonverbal cues — eye contact, posture, dress — that signal confidence and approachability.
 

2. Be Curious

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Jessica Campbell, executive director of the Career Development Office at Rice Business, encourages MBA students to think of networking as exploration, not extraction.

“People can tell when you’re reaching out for a transaction instead of a connection,” says Campbell. “Start by learning someone’s story and finding common ground. Trust grows when you lead with curiosity, not a request.”

Instead of asking, “Can you help me get a job?” Campbell suggests asking questions like “What do you enjoy most about your role?” or “What skills helped you succeed in your industry?” Curiosity opens doors that self-interest can close.

3. Diversify Your Connections

It’s easy to gravitate toward classmates or colleagues who share your background, interests or career goals. But your most valuable connections often come from unexpected places.

Join a club outside your comfort zone, attend a conference in a different field or volunteer for a cross-functional project. These experiences expand not only your network but also your perspective.

4. Follow Up — and Stay in Touch

The real work of networking happens after the first meeting. Send a short thank-you email, share an article related to a conversation you had, or simply check in periodically. Relationships deepen over time through small, consistent gestures of interest and respect.

“The conversation shouldn’t end when you walk out of the room,” Moore says. “A thoughtful follow-up shows that you valued the interaction — and gives you a chance to start building a relationship.”

5. Remember: Networking Is a Long Game

Your network doesn’t end when you graduate — it evolves with you. Stay curious, keep showing up, and you’ll find that the best connections are the ones that grow alongside your career.

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As Campbell notes, “The connections you make now may pay off years later. Listen, show respect, and invest in relationships over time, and you’ll build social capital that will carry you through every stage of your career.”

The MBA experience is one of the few times in your career when you’re surrounded by hundreds of ambitious, curious people who want to help each other grow. Show up with confidence, stay curious and play the long game — and you’ll leave business school with more than a degree. You’ll leave with a network that lasts a lifetime.
 

Explore the Rice MBA 

Owl Have You Know

Season 5, Episode 19

One year ago, the Virani family made a historic gift to Rice Business, establishing the Virani Undergraduate School of Business. To mark the occasion, Owl Have You Know welcomes Farid Virani — entrepreneur, philanthropist and proud Rice University parent.

In 1999, Farid founded Prime Communications with a single storefront in Houston’s Baybrook Mall. Today, Prime Communications is the largest AT&T authorized retailer in North America, with more than 2,500 locations across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Along the way, Farid has relied on three guiding principles — "stay humble, hungry and scrappy" — which continue to shape his approach to business and life.

He joins host Maya Pomroy ’22 to share his entrepreneurial journey, the Virani family’s commitment to education and community, and the vision behind the Virani Undergraduate School of Business — a school designed to empower the next generation of ethical, curious, and compassionate business leaders.

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Subscribe to Owl Have You Know on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

Association of Rice Alumni honors duo for service to university and beyond

Rushi Bhalani ’19 and Will Eldridge ’16 ’17 will be recognized with the Builders Award Nov. 7 during the President’s Town Hall, a signature event of Rice University’s Alumni Weekend. The Builders Award is given to graduates of the past 10 years who go above and beyond in service to Rice.

“Rushi and Will exemplify what it means to be builders — alumni who not only carry the spirit of Rice into the world but actively shape its future,” said David Leal, president of the Association of Rice Alumni (ARA). “Their dedication to strengthening the Rice community and empowering the next generation of Owls is inspiring, and we’re proud to honor them with the Builders Award.”

The award was established by the ARA in 2005 to honor recent alumni who have made outstanding contributions to Rice since graduation.

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Bhalani graduated with a degree in computer science and has remained deeply engaged with the university community. Guided by a belief in building up others through connection and care, he has served on three alumni boards: the Rice Engineering Alumni board of directors, the ARA board of directors and the Center for Career Development advisory board. In these roles, he has helped lead efforts such as raising more than $200,000 through data-driven outreach, launching a summer internship program that has provided dozens of engineering students with their first professional experiences under alumni mentors and strengthening support for recent graduates.

Beyond board service, Bhalani has volunteered as a Baker College community associate, admissions interviewer, Rice Fund volunteer and mentor to more than 20 students during and after their time at the university.

Professionally, he has worked as a strategy consultant at Accenture and led go-to-market strategy for a billion-dollar platform at Indeed. He is currently pursuing an MBA and a master’s degree in design innovation through the MMM program at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, preparing to design mission-driven, human-centered product experiences.

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Eldridge is a two-time Rice graduate who earned his bachelor’s degree in civil and environmental engineering from the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing and his master’s degree in accounting from the Jones Graduate School of Business.

His passion for contributing to his community through leadership and service started as a core part of the Rice experience. As an undergraduate, he was president of the French Club, an O-Week adviser and a Willy’s Pub bartender. His volunteerism has since expanded as a McMurtry College community associate, externship host, alumni board member, Rice Business mentor, five-year reunion co-chair and alumni admissions interviewer.

As the president of the Rice Business Alumni Association (RBAA) board and a member of Rice Business’ board of advisers, Eldridge is focused on defining the strategic plan for the RBAA. His passion for alumni community building extends beyond the hedges to the Awty International School, where he has also served as alumni board president.

Upon graduating from Rice, he worked at Deloitte, where he served oil and gas clients as a senior auditor. Eldridge earned his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and is a consultant at Bain & Co.

For more information about the Builders Award, visit alumni.rice.edu/builders. For more information about Alumni Weekend and the President’s Town Hall, including registration for the events, visit alumniweekend.rice.edu.