Riti Samanta is a managing director and part of the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) at State Street Global Advisors. She is responsible for the development of smart beta fixed income, currency, and active rates investment strategies for SSGA. Previously, she headed the Asset Allocation and Currency research teams developing investible strategies in these areas using quantitative models for return forecasting, risk measurement, and portfolio construction. She is part of the Fixed Income, Cash and Currency (FICC) SLT and a member of the Technical Committee that evaluates all quantitative research in the firm. She is a senior portfolio manager in FICC. Before joining SSGA, Riti was a senior research associate at State Street Associates using institutional flows, holdings and market returns to forecast investor behavior in equity and currency markets. She has published research on Extreme Value Theory, studying the effect of incorporating non-normalities and time-sensitive correlation structures in various aspects of quantitative modeling. Her research has been published in the Journal of Performance Measurement and presented at the Society for Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics. Riti holds a PhD in international finance and economics from Brandeis University, a MS in finance from Brandeis, and a BA in economics (minor in mathematics) from Reed College, where she held the Walter Mintz scholarship in economics.