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Chicago Booth Harper Center

Biography

Dr. Andria van der Merwe is an Executive Vice President at Compass Lexecon, specializing in complex litigation and regulatory investigations. 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 and executed trading strategies in fixed-income markets, focusing on debt, derivatives, and securitized products. Additional industry experience includes fixed-income portfolio management, including use of duration, convexity and other risk measures. Expert consulting engagements have been related to fixed income securities, including bonds, mortgages and structured products, and derivatives, including swaps, futures and options.

Dr. van der Merwe has presented to the American Bar Association, Swiss Finance Institute, 100 Women in Hedge Funds, and other esteemed organizations nationally and internationally. She has provided expert testimony in matters relating to credit, commodities and cryptocurrencies derivative trading and hedging.

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 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 ֱ.

2025 - 2026 Course Schedule

Number Course Title Quarter
The Economics of Digital Asset Products and Markets 2025 (Autumn)