Canisius faculty members strive to both educate their students and add to broaden knowledge in their fields. For Paul Yan, PhD, assistant professor of economics and finance, these two activities are tightly linked.
Dr. Yan has found that several open source (free) software packages provide powerful tools for financial modeling and uses them extensively in his finance classes. He has since written books on using these tools in finance. His first book, Python for Finance, was published in 2014. The book was adopted at Westminster College for the course of “Financial Analytics” and at Pennsylvania State University for the course of and “Data Science in Finance”. This year, Dr. Yan published Financial modeling using R. This book has been adopted as a textbook at Loyola University Maryland, Roman University, University at Buffalo and Canisius.
The books describe how two different powerful software packages can be used in different ways to help with finance, including a variety of useful measures like building financial calculators, exploring price options, developing financial models, risk management, and statistical testing. By learning how these software packages can be used in finance and by making them more accessible for students and professionals, Dr. Yan is truly modeling the teacher-scholar ideal.
Submitted by: Sara Morris, PhD, associate vice president, academic affairs
