About the Role
Morningstar Investment Management seeks a Retirement Researcher to join our team of research professionals on our Workplace team. The Director of Retirement Research is an industry thought leader serving as both an internal and external expert on a wide range of methodologies and defined contribution retirement topics.
This person will contribute to our efforts to take the best academic thinking around asset allocation, portfolio selection, guaranteed income, tax-efficiency, and financial planning/wellness to build real-world solutions that will improve the lives of millions of individuals as they save for retirement as well as spend-down during retirement.
This person will help contribute to a) the overall retirement managed account capability, b) the retirement research agenda, c) existing methodologies, d) new methodologies, e) translation of methodology into product requirements, and f) applied / practical thought-leadership whitepapers/reports. Furthermore, this candidate will represent and evangelize our capabilities from a methodological perspective externally (conferences, clients, prospects, media inquiries) and internally (product managers and software developers).
This position is based in Chicago.
Job Responsibilities• Develop, enhance, and maintain methodologies powering a range of discretionary and non-discretionary financial planning-oriented applications.• Contribute and execute on the retirement research agenda in collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders.• Serve as an internal and external expert on our retirement-oriented methodologies and defined contribution retirement topics.• Integrate proprietary research and financial planning concepts into production-ready software solutions by working closely with Morningstar research, product managers, and developers.• Produce and publish thought-leadership articles in the form of white papers, Morningstar Magazine articles, and journal publications.• Serve as a public speaker to advocate for Morningstar retirement related research.
Qualifications• A passion for helping the underserved gain access to the best possible financial advice based on rigorous theory at the lowest possible cost.• An affinity for investing and financial planning.• High levels of competence in managing and extracting information from large data sets• A Ph.D. in Finance, Economics, Financial Planning, or related field.• The ability to publish in practitioner journals.• Ability to build and maintain models in MATLAB and Python. Working knowledge of other languages (e.g. C++ or R) is a plus.• A gift for explaining sophisticated/complex topics to a wide range of audiences.• At least four years' experience modeling, applying, or practicing investment planning and financial planning methodologies.• Subject matter expertise in relevant defined contribution retirement topics.• Fluency with quantitative techniques and some familiarity with extracting data from a relational database.• Expertise in statistical models, Monte Carlo simulation, and optimization algorithms.• Excellent English-language oral and written communication.
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