The Institute is deeply saddened by the loss of our dear friend and colleague Dr. Konstantinos (Kostas) Kyriakoulis on May 1, 2015. He was 39.
A native of Greece, Dr. Kyriakoulis spent his early years growing up in Tripoli, a small city in the central part of the Peloponnese. He earned bachelor and master degrees in Economics from the University of Piraeus, and the Athens University of Economics and Business, respectively, before coming to the United States in January 2000 to pursue doctoral studies in the Department of Economics. His dissertation on “Second Order Approximations to the Distribution of GMM Statistics” was completed in April 2006 under the guidance of professors Alastair Hall, David Dickey, Atsushi Inoue, and Denis Pelletier.
In January 2006, while in the later stages of his doctorate, Dr. Kyriakoulis began working as a research statistician at SAS. There he developed credit risk models for the banking industry for six years before rising to a management position. Dr. Kyriakoulis specialized in counter-party risk analysis, migration and default-only risk modeling, Markov Chain (transition matrices) models, potential and future exposure analysis, and implementation of covariance and Monte Carlo simulation methods for the calculation of Portfolio VaR, Incremental VaR and Expected Shortfall.
Dr. Kyriakoulis had a passion for sharing knowledge. On top of his duties at SAS, in his spare time he would regularly visit campus to give introductory and advanced lectures on a range of topics. In January 2013, when the opportunity arose with our expansion, he accepted an offer to teach full-time at the Institute as an associate professor. His charmingly accented English notwithstanding, Dr. Kyriakoulis was a talented instructor who taught with admiration to many students over the years in the Master of Science in Analytics.
Though he cherished his time with students, last December Dr. Kyriakoulis announced his plan to leave at the end of spring semester to begin a new job leading a credit risk group based in Zurich. It was a difficult decision, but the new position was too good to pass up. He relished the thought of bringing his young family nearer to Greece, so they could visit with relatives more often.
Always cheerful, it was readily apparent to all who knew him, Dr. Kyriakoulis enjoyed every moment of his life as a professor. He was already looking forward to lecturing, whenever he could, on return visits to Raleigh. It was his heartfelt desire to remain active with the Institute and continue to contribute to the success of its students.
A devoted husband and father, Dr. Kyriakoulis is survived by his wife, Sofia, and their two daughters, Maria and Nicoletta.