• Appointed by The Community Foundation's Board of Directors for a term of seven years beginning January 1, 2022

Heather Tookes Alexopoulos, PhD, (Dr. Tookes) is a Professor of Finance at Yale School of Management, where she joined the faculty in 2004. Dr. Tookes’ research lies at the intersection of capital markets and corporate finance. Much of her work focuses on understanding the ways in which credit market frictions interact with firms’ financing decisions. She has a particular interest in credit default swap and convertible bond markets. She has also studied trader borrowing and has linked margin trading to the sharp declines in stock market liquidity that occur during crises. Recently, she has written a series of papers investigating a range of topics related to COVID-19, including the effectiveness of business restrictions and the impact of the pandemic on the academic finance profession. She teaches Corporate Finance to MBA and Executive MBA students.

Dr. Tookes is the Chair of the Academic Female Advisory Committee (AFFECT) of the American Finance Association (AFA), a member of the Committee on Racial Diversity (CORD) of the AFA, and a member of the FINRA Economic Advisory Committee. She also serves on the Board of Trustees of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and on the boards of Ariel Investments, Dimensional Funds and Payoneer Global. As a New Haven community member since 2004, she has served a number of local nonprofit organizations, including New Haven Youth Tennis and Education (NewHYTES), St. Thomas’s Day School and Trinity on the Green.

She is a former Associate Editor at the Review of Financial Studies and Management Science and former member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Financial Advisory Round Table. Dr. Tookes received her BA in Economics from Brown and her PhD in Finance from Cornell.