Elaine Wah Receives CoE Marian Sarah Parker Prize

Elaine Wah, a CSE PhD candidate, has been awarded a CoE Marian Sarah Parker Prize. The award is given to an outstanding woman graduate student who has demonstrated academic excellence, leadership qualities and outstanding contributions to the University and/or community.

Wah’s research interests lie at the intersection of finance and artificial intelligence, specifically in applying computational methods to study automated trading in financial markets.

She is currently working on her dissertation where she investigates the impact of two types of trading, high frequency trading or HFT and market making, on other market participants. In one paper published in 2013 at the 14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC), Wah and her advisor, Prof. Michael Wellman, developed a novel two-market model to capture the behavior of certain types of HFT strategies called latency arbitrage, which exercise superior speed to exploit price disparities between exchanges. They demonstrated that the presence of a latency arbitrageur can reduce trading gains for everyone, and that switching to a frequent call market in which orders are matched to trade periodically rather than continuously eliminates the advantage of speed and promotes efficiency.

Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and The Guardian. Prior to Michigan, she completed a BS in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MS in Computer Science at UCLA.

At U-M, Wah has been involved in CSEG, LeaderShape, and SURE. She has also received numerous other awards including the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship and the Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement .