Terrence M. OBrien

I am an Associate Clinical Professor of Finance at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, as well as the faculty director of the Private Equity Credit Program. My research interests include empirical asset pricing, specializing in Fintech, Cryptocurrency, and Machine Learning. In my job market paper, I use a novel measure of cryptocurrency volume manipulation based off intra-day order book and trade data to explore the effects volume manipulation has on daily and weekly volatility in a cross sectional analysis of popular cryptocurrency exchanges. I have extensive experience teaching Options and Derivatives at the undergraduate and graduate level, as well as Fixed Income Securities, and mathematical finance topics.

In 2025 I was given the Allen J. Crowe Award for Teaching Excellence by the Robert H. Smith School of Business.

My work was featured at the 2022 FMA Doctoral Student Consortium, the 2022 FMA Annual Meeting, the 2023 EFA Annual Meeting, and will be presented at the Cryptocurrency Research Conference 2023 in Monaco.

I completed my PhD in Finance at Penn State. Prior to that, I earned my Masters in Finance and an MBA from the University of Delaware. Before that, I was an economic analyst, and later the Executive Vice President of Operations, for a private American company which bought and sold Chinese government macroeconomic data.

• C.V. (2025)

• Teaching Experience