• 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 focuses on a range of topics in the areas of capital markets and corporate finance. Professor Tookes works on a diverse range of topics in the areas of capital markets and corporate finance. She has a particular interest in credit default swap and convertible bond markets and has studied the ways in which frictions in these markets interact with firms’ financing decisions. She has also studied trader borrowing and has linked margin trading to the sharp declines in stock market liquidity that occur during crises. More recently, she has written a series of papers investigating questions related to gender in finance as well as the effectiveness of Covid-19 business restrictions. She teaches Corporate Finance and has won awards for her teaching. 

Dr. Tookes serves on the Board of Trustees of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and on the boards of Ariel Investments, Dimensional Funds, and Charles River Associates.  She is also a member of the FINRA Economic Advisory Committee.  

As a New Haven community member since 2004, Dr. Tookes 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 also a former Associate Editor at the Review of Financial Studies and Management Science and a former member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Financial Advisory Roundtable.  She previously served as Chair of the Academic Female Advisory Committee (AFFECT) of the American Finance Association (AFA) and as a member of the AFA’s Committee on Racial Diversity (CORD). Dr. Tookes received her BA in Economics from Brown and her PhD in Finance from Cornell.