Conference Keynotes
Keynote: Professor Hans Christenson
Chookaszian Family Professor of Accounting, David G. Booth Faculty Fellow, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Hans Christensen is the Chookaszian Family Professor of Accounting and David G. Booth Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His current research primarily focuses on the effect on society of regulation aimed at incentivizing firms to act socially responsible. This includes the effect of transparency regulation on healthcare prices and labor safety, as well as, foreign corruption regulation on economic development. His papers have been published in the Journal of Accounting Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, Review of Accounting Studies, and Review of Financial Studies. Within the corporate world, Christensen previously worked as a financial auditor with the firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Keynote: JingDong Hua
Vice-Chair of ISSB, Vice President and Treasurer of the World Banks
Mr. Hua joins the ISSB leadership team in October 2022 as Vice-Chair. He is also Vice President and Treasurer of the World Bank and serves as the Pension Finance Administrator of the World Bank Group. As Vice President and Treasurer of the World Bank, he is responsible for the capital markets operations and oversees an annual funding program of US$60 to 70 billion. He leads a global team of capital markets professionals in the prudent management of US$200 billion debt portfolio. Mr. Hua was previously Vice President and Treasurer of IFC, where he established a global treasury and focused on the development of local currency debt capital markets and innovative financial products and solutions. Prior to IFC, Mr. Hua served as Deputy Treasurer at the Asian Development Bank in Manila. He holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Qingdao University of Science and Technology, an MBA Finance from the University of Texas at Arlington, and a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from Columbia University.
Learn more at the World Bank and IFRS
Conference Speakers & Panellists
Professor Khrystyna Bochkay
Associate Professor of Accounting, the University of Miami, Academic Fellow at SASB and ISSB
Khrystyna Bochkay is an Associate Professor of Accounting at the University of Miami (UM). She joined the faculty at UM in 2014 after completing her PhD in Accounting at Rutgers University. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and a Master of Science in Statistics from Ivan Franko National University in L’viv, Ukraine.
Currently, Khrystyna serves as an Academic Fellow at the International Sustainability Standards Board and her responsibilities include examining costs and benefits of sustainability reporting around the world, analysis of global sustainability trends, and public outreach. Khrystyna’s recent research focuses on companies’ voluntary adoption of sustainability standards and its effects on management actions. Khrystyna's research has been presented at leading conferences and workshops in the US and worldwide and appeared in The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting, Auditing, and Finance, and Foundations and Trends in Accounting.
Nura Taef
CPA, CA, Partner, Co-lead, ESG Reporting Advisory, Deloitte Canada
Nura leads Deloitte’s ESG Reporting Advisory practice in Canada and is the Deputy Global A&A Sustainability and Climate Services Leader. Nura advises clients on assessing, quantifying, and communicating climate and broader sustainability risks and metrics in corporate reporting. She is a member of Deloitte’s Global Expert Advisory Panel on Sustainability Reporting, a forum for knowledge sharing and collaboration among jurisdictions globally to evolve financial and non-financial disclosure and stewardship to meet stakeholder needs now and in the future.
Nura has worked with clients throughout North America and the U.K. to help them understand the linkage between their climate and sustainability business strategies and disclosure, and guide them through the associated financial statement complexities. She has over 13 years of combined experience in financial statement audit and complex and technical accounting, supporting both private and public companies of all sizes and across industries and sectors.
Scott Morrison
CPA, CA, Director, ESG and Sustainability, PwC Canada
Scott is a Director in PwC’s ESG and Sustainability practice. Through his experience working in Toronto and New York, he has gained a wealth of knowledge of issues affecting businesses in multiple industries, allowing him to bring new ideas to his clients and help solve their complex problems. Scott has assisted leading organizations in building trust around their sustainability performance and worked with clients to help meet their non-financial assurance needs. He is recognized for his ability to understand a client’s reporting requirements, and to then develop a strategy and approach to meeting those needs.
His expertise includes engagements on a variety of ESG topics including GHG emissions, financed emissions, sustainable debt, and other non-financial reporting metrics. During his career, Scott has also worked on a variety of assurance and advisory engagements helping clients develop IFRS accounting policy papers, implement financial reporting systems, interpret technical accounting matters, and provide assurance readiness assessments. He is an active contributor and developer of PwC’s thought leadership pieces, mostly recently around the impact of ISSB developments, ESG reporting insights, and sustainable finance.
Professor Aneesh Raghunandan
Assistant Professor of Accounting, London School of Economics
Aneesh Raghunandan is a faculty member in the accounting department at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) issues, with a particular emphasis on the extent to which stated private- and public-sector efforts to measure and improve ESG performance result in actual change. To better understand what drives firms’ treatment of key stakeholders and whether investors account for this, much of his work studies ESG issues through the lens of corporate misconduct. His work has been published in top journals and cited extensively in leading media outlets such as the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and The Economist. He has also served as an expert witness before the UK Parliament on ESG reporting issues. He received his PhD from Stanford University and BSc from Yale University. Prior to academia he worked at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC.
Professor Kelsey Leonard
Assistant Professor, the Faculty of Environment, the University of Waterloo
Dr. Kelsey Leonard is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, where her research focuses on Indigenous water justice and its climatic, territorial, and governance underpinnings. Dr. Leonard seeks to establish Indigenous traditions of water conservation as the foundation for international water policymaking.
Dr. Leonard has been instrumental in safeguarding the interests of Indigenous Nations for environmental planning and builds Indigenous science and knowledge into new solutions for water governance and sustainable oceans. In collaboration with a global team of water law scholars Dr. Leonard has published in Lewis and Clark Law Review on Indigenous Water Justice and the defining international legal principle of self-determination under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Her recent scholarship explores legal personhood for water and you can watch her TEDTalk here: TEDTalk “Why lakes and rivers should have the same rights as humans”
Professor Irene Wiecek
Professor of Accounting, Director of the MMPA Program, Director of BigDataAIHub
Read Professor Irene Wiecek's bio here
Siddharth Samarth
Executive Director, Sustainable Finance, CIBC Capital Markets
Siddharth Samarth has a banking career spanning over 14 years. He is currently responsible for CIBC’s Sustainable Finance franchise. He advises clients on fixed income green and sustainable finance products and has been involved in the execution of a number of green and sustainability-linked financings including those for the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, Enbridge and TransAlta Corporation. He is a member of the team working with the Canadian Standards Association to develop a Transition Standard for Canada. He is also a part of the Climate Transition Working Group under the auspices of the International Capital Markets Association.
Prior to this role, Mr. Samarth was a part of the Power, Utilities and Project Finance team where he was responsible for the relationship development and management of clients in investor-owned Power & Utilities, Infrastructure Funds and Pension Funds. He has worked on closing and executing over $14 billion of non-recourse bank financings which includes over 4.5GWs of renewable and conventional power financings, acquisition of infrastructure assets such as ports and airports and energy infrastructure.
Mr. Samarth received his MBA from the University of Western Ontario and his BE in Mechanical Engineering from Pune University.