Biography:

Gilles is a Professor of Finance at Imperial College Business School and Co-director of Imperial's Centre for Financial Technology and a visiting scholar at Harvard University in the Spring 2026. He is also a research fellow at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, a research fellow at Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a senior research fellow at the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis (RCEA), and a member of the American Finance Association, American Economic Association, Western Finance Association, and European Finance Association. He currently serves as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Empirical Finance.

Gilles holds a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics, an MSc in economics from the Paris School of Economics, and he is a graduate engineer from Ponts Paristech. Prior to joining Imperial, Gilles was an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. He has also worked in corporate finance at BNP Paribas, as an independent consultant for a variety of corporate, financial, and governmental institutions and professional and international organisations, and he has served on a wide range of boards.

Gilles' research interests include digital assets, platform finance, data science and causal inference, entrepreneurial finance, private equity and venture capital, corporate finance, corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate risk management, energy markets, security design and securitization, debt markets, asset allocation, pension funds, financial regulation and policymaking. Gilles' research has been published in top academic journals, and has been presented at multiple institutions including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, UCLA, Columbia, NYU, Minnesota, LBS, LSE, Oxford, Cambridge, and Insead.

Gilles coauthored in 2026 Private equity in healthcare and life sciences. with Marc Kitten, founding partner of Candesic. This book offers a state-of-the-art coverage at private equity, including on valuation, sources of value creation, AI and tokenization, its essential role throughout the healthcare sector, and its implications on stakeholders and society.