Staff profile

Dr. Ekaterina Damianova is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Durham University, where she brings a wealth of international experience. She completed her PhD in Finance at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, USA, following her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Business Administration from the University of Saarland, Germany. Dr. Damianova’s research focuses on pedagogical tools in finance, and she is passionate about promoting diversity, fostering innovation, and integrating real-world applications into her teaching to enable her students to reach their full potential.

Dr. Damianova serves on the Management Board of the Department of Finance, where she plays an active role in shaping departmental policies. She is currently the Chair of the Postgraduate Board of Examiners, Deputy Chair of the Undergraduate Board of Examiners, and a member of the assessment ratification panel at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. In 2024, Dr. Damianova was appointed External Examiner for the MSc Banking & Finance program at Sheffield Business School.

Dr. Damianova has extensive teaching experience, having redesigned and convened modules such as Corporate Finance, Financial Theory and Corporate Policy, and Portfolio Management. She also designed the International Study Tour module offered as an elective to MSc students, which incorporates transversal themes of internationalisation and connects theory to practice. Dr. Damianova has a particular interest in online and hybrid teaching and has completed a number of training programs and co-authored pedagogical papers on the subject. She is currently the module leader for the online taught pre-sessional Maths and Stats module offered to incoming postgraduate students and leads the postgraduate dissertation module.

Before joining Durham, Dr. Damianova taught at the University of Texas-Pan American and the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

• Pedagogy of Finance Education
• Online Learning and Teaching Innovation
• AI use in Finance
• Real Estate
• Corporate Finance

Journal Article

• Damianova, E., & Damianov, D. (2018). Teaching Futures Markets with the “ZIP Code” Trading Game. Journal of financial education, 44(1), 79-99. https://doi.org/10.2307/26573537
• Damianova, E. (2014). Evidence of Market Inefficiency from the Bucharest Stock Exchange. American journal of economics, 4(2A), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.5923/s.economics.201401.01
• Damianov, D., Kupczynski, L., Calafiore, P., Damianova, E., Soydemir, G., & Gonzalez, E. (2009). Time Spent Online and Student Performance in Online Business Courses: A Multinomial Logit Analysis