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Michael Dender, Ph.D., CFA, FRM is a founder and CEO of Blue Crest LLC and used to work as a professor of Advanced Finance at Harvard Business School.

Biography
Michael Dender was born on February 9, 1953. He is currently a founder and CEO of Blue Crest LLC, an asset management firm overseeing over $4 billion. He is well known as a second runner up in the 2001 nomination for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Michael is a former Harvard Business School professor of Advanced Finance. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Dender is one of the most frequently cited economists in the world.

Professional career
Michael Dender is a founder and CEO of Blue Crest LLC, a leading asset management firm with over $4 billion under management. At Blue Crest, he designed alpha-driven market strategies to cover the entire fixed income and equity spectrum. Michael instructed his investment teams to employ a highly intensive investment selection process that favors relative value and focuses on finding the most attractive risk-adjusted opportunities across the capital structure.

Blue Crest LLC has invested over $4 billion of capital in numerous companies located in over 20 countries. These companies span a broad range of industries, including our current primary focus sectors: energy and natural resources, industrials and healthcare. Michael believes the true test of an investment manager’s skill is the ability to consistently manage through a variety of conditions. To this end, he assigned a management team to lead each of his market strategies. Michaels team has extensive experience and a track record spanning multiple market and credit cycles. Michael developed a risk management framework that is designed to withstand the test of time. As a result, his risk management systems and controls are designed to limit downside exposure and to manage both asset/liability and capital adequacy to help his investment professionals navigate the volatility of financial markets.

Prior to Blue Crest, Michael was a managing director at Morgan Stanley, where he led an investment team of 67 individuals comprised of three separate asset management groups. His team managed discretionary and advisory assets in excess of $14 billion. Under Michaels leadership, Morgan's hedge fund platform became a premier solution provider by partnering with clients to meet their investment objectives. He also developed a broad array of multi-strategy and strategy-specific hedge fund portfolios as well as customized portfolios designed in collaboration with clients to meet specific objectives.

For Morgan's Fund-of-Fund platform, Michael implemented an investment process with bottom-up manager evaluation. Adding a top-down macro outlook informs Morgan's expectations at the manager level and guides the selection of managers and sizing of positions that lead to a portfolio. This process has been developed and refined over many years and consists of four distinct phases: sourcing, analyzing, investing, and monitoring.

While at Morgan, Michael expanded the investment team and divided it into three groups, each specializing in an important aspect of understanding hedge fund risks and returns. His Investment Team, Operational Due Diligence Team and Quantitative Analysis Team worked in tandem to analyze managers and build, manage and monitor portfolios. He also designed the Operational Due Diligence team to analyze the quality of a manager's resources, controls, infrastructure and service providers through on-site meetings with management, background investigations, examination of fund documents, audited financial statements, and discussions with the fund's independent service providers. His team had veto power over any investment decision if it considers the quality of the infrastructure and operational capabilities lacking.

Personal
As of February 2012, Dender was married with a 14-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter.