Biography
Dr. Andria van der Merwe is an Executive Vice President at Compass Lexecon where she specializes in complex litigation and regulatory investigations related to financial markets. She provides consulting and testimonial expertise in derivatives, fixed income securities, market microstructure, cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies. Before joining Compass Lexecon, she served as a Director of Portfolio Management at the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, where she developed as well as executed trading strategies in fixed-income markets, focusing on debt, derivatives and securitized products.
As an author, Dr. van der Merwe wrote Market Liquidity Risk: Implications for Asset Pricing, Risk Management and Financial Regulation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and co-authored Credit Default Swaps: Mechanics and Empirical Evidence on Benefits, Costs, and Inter-Market Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her research has been published in several internationally renowned journals on topics including complex mathematical algorithms to extract information from digital signatures and economic analysis of cryptocurrency. Dr. van der Merwe holds three U.S. patents that propose new communication protocols for wireless network services.
Dr. van der Merwe has presented to audiences around the world from Munich, Germany to Zurich, Switzerland to London and Chicago. Her topics include economics in litigation context, economics of blockchain, cryptocurrency and bitcoin and managing liquidity and liquidity risks, for esteemed groups including the American Bar Association, Swiss Finance Institute and 100 Women in Hedge Funds.
Dr. van der Merwe earned her Ph.D. in electrical engineering with concentrations in signal processing and applied mathematics from The Ohio State University and an M.B.A. with concentrations in finance, econometrics and accounting from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She is a Research Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise.