Maureen O'Hara, professor of finance at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, was named president of the American Finance Association this January. O'Hara, who is the Robert W. Purcell Professor of Management at the Johnson School, is the first woman to lead the AFA – the premier academic organization on financial economics.

O'Hara's area of specialty is the microstructure of financial markets. That research area looks at how the structure of securities markets affects the behavior of financial asset prices. O'Hara notes: "While markets such as stock exchanges or futures markets were largely unchanged for 100 or more years, that all changed with the advent of technology and the stock market crash of 1987. The issue has since become not how markets are structured, but how they should be structured."

Microstructure researchers analyze how the specific rules of exchange influence the prices that emerge, which leads to insights into the optimal way to design and regulate markets, says O'Hara. She explains: "An important issue is how does new information get incorporated into stock prices. Investors will lose to insiders if stock prices do not accurately reflect all available information, but how well and quickly the new information gets into prices depends, in part, on the rules of the trading system. Those rules also influence how much the gains from trade are split between the dealers who buy and sell securities, and the investors."

Roni Michaely, Cornell professor of finance and a colleague of O'Hara's at the Johnson School, calls her one of the leaders in the field of market microstructure. "She was able to join a new subfield of finance at the early stages and make a significant contribution – to separate the forest from the trees," he said. Michaely also praised her for "her ability to reinvent herself." She is now is doing interdisciplinary empirical research on microstructure and corporate finance, he said.

O'Hara joined the Johnson School in 1979, after earning an M.A. in economics and a Ph.D. in finance at Northwestern University, and in 1985 she became the first tenured female faculty member at the Johnson School. She is the author of Market Microstructure Theory (Blackwell Publishers, 1995) and executive editor of the Review of Financial Studies. I n 2000 the Financial Management Association named her an FMA fellow, an honor granted to only a handful of finance researchers.