1130 East Helen Street
McClelland Hall, Room 311
Tucson, AZ
USA 85721
Anjelina Belakovskaia is a Finance Lecturer and Faculty Advisor at the Eller College of Management, University of Arizona. She is also a Faculty Associate at Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University. Anjelina's expertise lies in the area of risk management and financial derivatives. Over the last 24 years, Anjelina has been involved in trading of Foreign Exchange, Equities, Weather and Exotic derivatives. As a weather derivatives trader and Head of the Weather Desk at Williams Energy, she was one of the pioneers, who introduced new dual-trigger Weather-Gas and Weather-Power options, to enhance the financial management of weather risk. Working closely with other groups, Belakovskaia designed numerous new products, offering important cutting-edge risk management solutions to utilities and other end users, and simultaneously developing tools to qualify and quantify weather exposure and methods of pricing various cross-commodity hedging strategies. In 2002, Anjelina was recognized as one of the “Best Female Employees” for her contribution to the Company. For the last 7 years, Anjelina has been sharing her expertise and passion with the students. She is teaching Risk Management and Derivatives, Global Financial Engineering, Fixed Income and "Chess, Leadership and Business Strategy" classes. Belakovskaia earned her master’s in Mathematics in Finance from New York University in 2001. Prior to that, Belakovskaia earned a bachelor’s in Economics from Odessa State Agrarian University in Ukraine. She graduated in 1990 and spent a few years on postgraduate work on Ph.D. in 1990-1991 in Ukraine. For many years, Anjelina was a Professional Chess Player, member of the US Olympic Women’s Chess Team (1991-2000). She achieved the highest chess title – Woman International Grandmaster (1993). In 2000, Belakovskaia was honored by the President of Brooklyn, City of New York for superlative chess and leadership skills and overall outstanding achievements. Since 2010, Anjelina has run the Belakovskaia Chess Academy for children in K-12, to share her exceptional knowledge and accomplishments as a 3-time US Women’s Chess Champion. As Chess and Weather Risk Management continue to be her two passions, Belakovskaia is actively involved in both areas, serving as a Member-At-Large on the Executive Board of the US Chess Federation and being a member of Financial Weather / Climate Risk Management Committee of AMS since its inception.
Paper:7 Financial Weather Risk in the Economy: Tools to Identify and Measure It and Necessity to Manage It