L to R: Thomas J. LeBlanc, executive vice president and provost, University of Miami, Frances Aldrich Sevilla-Sacasa, AB’77, interim dean, Alok Kumar, Gabelli Asset Management Professor of Finance, and Mario J. Gabelli, chairman and CEO, GAMCO Investors, Inc.

The School has established a new endowed professorship thanks to a gift from New York financial executive Mario Gabelli. The Gabelli Asset Management Endowed Professorship in Finance will be held by Alok Kumar, who joined the school’s Department of Finance last fall.

The professorship was announced during a luncheon earlier this month to honor Gabelli, who is the chairman and CEO of GAMCO Investors, a New York-based provider of investment advice to alternative investments, mutual funds, and institutional and high net-worth investors.

“Endowed professorships, which we are here to celebrate, are critical to our strategy,” said Frances Aldrich Sevilla-Sacasa, the School’s interim dean. “They provide us with critical support for our faculty, research and services initiatives, all of which bring prominence to our institution.”

In addition to the Finance Professorship, GAMCO has supported the School’s academic initiatives, scholarship programs, mentoring, and job placement initiatives. Gabelli founded the firm in 1977 as an institutional broker-dealer and it has since grown into a widely recognized financial services corporation.

Prior to joining the UM School of Business, Kumar was an associate professor of finance for four years at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in behavioral finance, empirical asset pricing, corporate finance and computational economics.