Now 300 PhD graduates
November 4, 2013
This morning, Saad Serghini Idrissi became the 300th doctoral student at HEC Montréal to successfully defend his thesis before a jury. This impressive number illustrates the importance of the School’s PhD program in educating high-level researchers in all management disciplines for the past 38 years.
This PhD in Administration is one of a kind in North America, thanks to its bilingual nature and its scope. It is offered by HEC Montréal jointly with Concordia and McGill universities and the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Students have access to a pool of some 400 professors, 260 of them at HEC Montréal.
With close to 150 students out of a total of about 400 enrolled in the joint program at the moment, HEC Montréal accounts for 35% of the PhD in Administration students in Montréal, 60% of them international students or permanent residents. The joint program can already boast just over 650 graduates, 300 of them from HEC Montréal, in one of the 10 program specializations. Nearly 75% of HEC Montréal PhD graduates hold professor-researcher positions (58% in Quebec, 18% elsewhere in Canada, 24% abroad). Most of the others are consultants, analysts or senior managers.
“Our graduates are extraordinary ambassadors for HEC Montréal and Quebec,” emphasizes Program Director Alain d'Astous. “Most of them are working in universities all over the world, and make up an excellent network for sharing knowledge and offering opportunities for collaboration on all kinds of research and teaching projects with the School’s professors.“
Management sciences
The thesis by Saad Serghini Idrissi, who is a co-ordinator at the HEC Montréal Mathematics Help Centre, entitled Une approche pour l'évaluation de dérivés financiers de type bermudien, is in the vast field of management sciences. It suggests a general and flexible evaluation method for financial products, using dynamic programming coupled with the Clenshaw-Curtis quadrature. The thesis shows that the choice of a location interval based on the exercise boundary of an option can significantly accelerate the convergence of the option's value approximation and provides higher accuracy than currently available methods. After showing how to apply this method to the evaluation of Bermudian options under different models, Saad Serghini Idrissi concludes that it can easily be applied to any Bermudian option, regardless of the payoff function. Unlike simulation-based approaches, this method gives the value of several contracts at once.
In addition to Michèle Breton, Director of Academic Affaires, and Professor Francisco Javier de Frutos Baraja (Universidad de Valladolid, Spain), thesis co-supervisors, the jury for Saad Serghini Idrissi’s thesis defence consisted of professors Chantal Labbé (jury chair/rapporteur), Erick Delage (jury member) and Redouane Elkamhi, of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (external examiner). Professor Ryad Titah, representing the Director of the School, also attended.