The conference was hosted by the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and co-organized by China Finance Review International (CFRI), Modern Risk Society (MRS), and the Dishui Lake Advanced Institute of Finance at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. This transpacific partnership reflects a broader trend in academic finance: the recognition that risk, in its many modern forms, does not respect national boundaries or disciplinary silos. The collaboration brought together journal editors, database providers, and research institutes from both sides of the Pacific, creating a forum in which methodological debates could unfold against the backdrop of a rapidly changing technological and environmental landscape. For many attendees, particularly early-career researchers, the event served as both a showcase and a matchmaking opportunity for future collaborations.

The scientific program opened with a pair of special panel discussions that confronted the practical challenges of applying artificial intelligence in financial research and practice. In the “Data, AI and Applications” roundtable, scholars Rui Dai of WRDS, Jian Chen of Fudan University, Mehmet Saglam of the University of Cincinnati, and Yuehua Tang of the University of Florida debated the boundaries of AI-enabled finance under the moderation of Xuanjuan Chen of the Dishui Lake Advanced Institute of Finance at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. The discussion ranged from intelligent customer service systems to large-scale text mining, and the panelists converged on a point that resonates far beyond the conference hall: in core risk control areas, algorithms must still defer to professional judgment. The exchange captured a tension now running through the entire discipline, as machine learning tools demonstrate remarkable pattern-recognition capabilities while regulators and risk managers grapple with questions of accountability, interpretability, and model risk.

A second panel, titled “Let’s Talk AI,” shifted the spotlight to a younger generation of researchers. Jiakai Chen of the University of Hawaii, Eileen Zhang of Rutgers University, Bochen Li of Monmouth University, and Zhao Wang of Capital University of Economics and Business demonstrated the diverse possibilities of AI tools in cutting-edge financial research. Their presentations spanned the interpretation of Federal Reserve policy communications, the analysis of news narratives, and generative information extraction, illustrating how natural language processing and related techniques are transforming the raw material of financial economics. Where researchers once relied on coarse textual classifications or manually coded event studies, they can now parse central bank statements, earnings calls, and news flows at scale, extracting measures of sentiment, uncertainty, and narrative momentum that feed directly into asset pricing and risk models. The session offered a glimpse of a methodological shift that is reshaping empirical finance from the ground up.

The intellectual centerpiece of the opening day arrived with the keynote address. Hosted by Professor Qianqiu Liu, Chair of the Finance Department at the University of Hawaii, the keynote was delivered by Professor Torben G. Andersen of Northwestern University, one of the most influential figures in the empirical study of financial volatility. His talk, “Inference for Option-Implied Risk Measures,” tackled a deceptively simple problem with deep practical consequences: how to extract reliable risk measurements from option prices when those prices are contaminated by measurement error. Option-implied measures of risk are foundational to modern risk management, informing everything from value-at-risk calculations to stress testing and derivative pricing. Yet option markets are imperfect, and the errors embedded in observed prices can propagate through downstream estimates in ways that distort inference.

Andersen’s proposed solution is a new nonparametric estimation method that improves the handling of correlations across option pricing errors. The technical significance lies in what nonparametric approaches avoid: rather than imposing a rigid functional form on the relationship between option prices and underlying risk, the method lets the data speak while explicitly accounting for the error structure that contaminates observations. By modeling the cross-correlations of pricing errors more effectively, the approach yields risk measures with more reliable statistical properties, providing practitioners with a sturdier theoretical tool for risk management. For an audience steeped in the uncertainties of AI-driven markets and climate-exposed portfolios, the message was clear: even as finance embraces new technologies, the discipline’s progress still depends on rigorous measurement and careful inference at the most fundamental level.

The conference also served as a stage for honoring sustained excellence in risk research. At an awards ceremony hosted by Professor Wei Huang of the University of Hawaii, ten distinct honors were presented, including the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal Research Excellence Award, the Global Association of Risk Professionals Research Excellence Award, the China Finance Review International Research Excellence Award, the Asia-Pacific Journal of Risk and Insurance Research Excellence Award, the Sinofin CCER Database Research Excellence Award, and the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics Research Excellence Award. Modern Risk Society conferred its own slate of recognitions, among them the Edward Kane Memorial Research Excellence Award, the Contribution Award, the Distinguished Leadership Award, and the Lifetime Achievement Award. Professor Wenfeng Wu, Editor-in-Chief of CFRI and a faculty member at the Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, presented the MRS Lifetime Achievement Award and the CFRI Research Excellence Award, underscoring the journal’s role in promoting interdisciplinary research on risk and finance.

Beyond the formal sessions, the conference cultivated the informal exchanges where collaborations are often born. An evening welcome reception at the Shidler College of Business set a relaxed tone in the Aloha atmosphere of Honolulu, and the following night the gathering moved to the Imin International Conference Center for the Presidents’ Reception. Amid the garden scenery of the University of Hawaii, attendees deepened their conversations over dinner, while a lucky draw featuring exclusive tickets designed and produced by CFRI added a moment of levity to the proceedings. These social rituals, easily dismissed as peripheral, perform a genuine scientific function: they lower the barriers between senior professors and doctoral students, between journal editors and authors, and between researchers from different national traditions, enabling the candid conversations that formal presentations rarely permit.

The parallel sessions of July 18 and 19 formed the analytical heart of the meeting. Across 64 sessions, the 199 presented papers ranged from subversive challenges to long-standing assumptions in financial economics to brave explorations of entirely new research paradigms. The heavy weighting of AI and climate topics was no accident. Artificial intelligence is simultaneously a subject of study, as markets adopt algorithmic trading and machine learning-based credit scoring, and a methodological instrument, as researchers deploy it to parse text, forecast volatility, and model complex dependencies. Climate finance, meanwhile, has moved from the margins to the mainstream as physical risks and transition risks reshape asset valuations, insurance markets, and regulatory frameworks. Many attendees remarked that the conference not only refreshed their thinking but also helped them find like-minded research partners, a testament to the organizing committee’s curation of the program.

The event also carried an institutional dimension. Throughout the three days, the CFRI journal team operated a booth at the venue, introducing the journal’s features, submission process, and recent key topics to participating scholars, distributing promotional materials, and inviting high-quality manuscripts. The team also visited the Shidler College of Business for a special meeting with Professor Qianqiu Liu, exchanging in-depth views on frontier research in finance, international academic cooperation, and journal co-development. CFRI, an English-language journal hosted by Antai College of Economics and Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and published by Emerald Publishing Group, has grown steadily since its founding in 2011 and is now indexed in more than twenty international databases, with a 2025 Impact Factor of 10.8. As the organizing committee closed the meeting with the message “Until next time, stay curious,” the gathering in Honolulu made a persuasive case that the study of risk, whether driven by algorithms or by a changing climate, has become one of the defining scientific projects of the decade.

Subject of Research: Artificial intelligence and climate risk in international financial research

Article Title: 2026 MRS International Risk Conference successfully concludes in Hawaii

Article References: 2026 MRS International Risk Conference successfully concludes in Hawaii. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: artificial intelligence, climate finance, climate risk, risk management, financial research, option-implied risk measures, machine learning, academic conference, China Finance Review International, University of Hawaii, text mining, volatility estimation

The study examined 1,400 Maui adults, measuring concentrations of 24 different metals in urine samples while simultaneously assessing pulmonary function through standardized breathing tests conducted at the same visit. When researchers compared the results against national biomonitoring reference data from the United States, the disparities were striking. Participants showed antimony concentrations nearly 40 times higher than U.S. reference values, manganese at 3.8 times, barium at 2.3 times and arsenic at 2.2 times the national benchmarks. These are not trace deviations; they represent a population carrying a metal burden far beyond what typical American residents experience.

The pulmonary findings may prove even more consequential. Across three complementary statistical approaches, higher combined metal exposure was consistently associated with several measures of abnormal lung function. Arsenic, cadmium, copper and antimony emerged as the metals contributing most strongly to those patterns. Each of these substances has well-documented toxicological profiles: arsenic and cadmium are established carcinogens, antimony is a metalloid used in flame retardants and electronics, and copper in excess can damage respiratory tissue. The convergence of elevated body burdens and measurable respiratory impairment in the same individuals points to a public health problem that outlasts the emergency phase of a disaster by many months.

The researchers are careful, however, not to attribute the entire burden to the fires alone. Because no pre-wildfire biomonitoring data exist for these residents, the study cannot determine precisely how much of the measured metal load came directly from the August 2023 disaster versus chronic, persistent or other ongoing exposures. Hawaiʻi’s geology, a long history of agricultural and industrial land use, diet and other environmental factors may all have contributed to exposures that predated the fires. The disaster may then have introduced entirely new contaminants while simultaneously disturbing and remobilizing pollutants already locked in soil, dust and the built environment. Disentangling those pathways, the team says, will require longitudinal biomonitoring and environmental sampling over years.

What makes the Maui situation scientifically distinct is the nature of the fire itself. Much of the existing knowledge about wildfire health effects derives from studies of smoke generated by burning vegetation. But the Lahaina fire belonged to a different and increasingly common category: the wildland–urban interface disaster, in which flames sweep through neighborhoods rather than forests. Such fires consume homes, vehicles, electronics, treated lumber and electrical systems, generating complex chemical mixtures that bear little resemblance to wood smoke. At the same time, they disturb pollutants accumulated in soil from decades of earlier agricultural, industrial or other land uses, redistributing them across the landscape during cleanup and recovery.

Those materials can remain in ash, settled dust, soil and debris long after the flames are extinguished, creating continued exposure pathways that include resuspended fine particles, direct contact with contaminated dust and debris, and indirect environmental exposure even when the air looks clear. This is the mechanism the MauiWES team believes explains why metal burdens remained elevated in residents’ bodies many months after the disaster. When a fire burns through an entire community, it can fundamentally alter how contaminants move through the environment, transforming a static contamination landscape into a dynamic and prolonged source of human exposure.

The geographic patterns uncovered by the study add another layer of complexity. Exposure was not confined to Lahaina, the town most closely associated with the disaster. Lahaina residents did show a distinct metal profile, including relatively elevated concentrations of arsenic and cadmium, but Wailuku and Kahului residents recorded the highest median concentrations of copper, iron and molybdenum. Kula and Kihei displayed different metal profiles as well, underscoring that no single uniform exposure pattern existed across the island. Pulmonary impairment varied in parallel: among interpretable breathing test results, Wailuku and Kahului exhibited some of the highest prevalence of abnormal lung-function measures, while Lahaina also showed substantial impairment and Kula generally showed the lowest burden.

These spatial differences suggest that the post-disaster exposure landscape is far more complicated than a simple comparison between people inside and outside a burn zone. The researchers believe the measured metal mixtures reflect overlapping contributions from wildfire-generated material, contaminants remobilized by the disaster, historically contaminated soils, local land use, geology and other ongoing environmental sources. Determining the relative contribution of each pathway is now a central focus of the research program, and the answer will shape how communities recovering from urban fires should be monitored and protected.

The implications extend well beyond Hawaiʻi. As destructive fires increasingly reach developed communities across the American West, Australia, the Mediterranean and elsewhere, the Maui findings suggest that disaster-response systems may need to look beyond short-term measurements of smoke and particulate matter. Future responses, the researchers argue, could include longer-term environmental monitoring, human biomonitoring, respiratory surveillance and targeted assessment of soil, ash and settled dust, particularly in places with histories of agricultural or industrial contamination. In September 2026, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences awarded the team a five-year, $3.6 million grant to investigate pollutants left behind by decades of agricultural and industrial activity in Hawaiʻi and to examine whether wildfires and other disasters can remobilize those contaminants into new pathways of human exposure.

That new project, led by MauiWES co-directors Alika Maunakea and Ruben Juarez together with Alison Lee of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, will follow approximately 1,000 Hawaiʻi residents over five years, combining environmental measurements, biological samples and cardiopulmonary assessments. Its goal is to distinguish persistent background exposures, legacy contamination and disaster-related exposures while examining how each contributes to heart and lung health over time. Together, the studies shift the scientific question from simply asking what a wildfire released to a broader and more consequential one: how a disaster transforms an existing environmental contamination landscape and changes what people are exposed to in the months and years that follow.

The research team has also emphasized that the study was designed not merely to document harm but to connect participants with information and care. MauiWES participants receive access to their individual health results, opportunities to discuss those findings with the research team, and referrals when screening identifies potential health concerns. The study will continue following families over time to understand how health evolves during Maui’s recovery. Juarez acknowledged that the findings may be difficult for families who have already endured so much, but stressed that the team’s responsibility extends beyond publishing the science to returning information to the community, connecting people with care when they need it, and continuing to learn alongside Maui as the island rebuilds. For now, the central lesson stands: exposure may not end when the smoke clears, and the next scientific challenge is to understand which exposures persist, where they come from and what they mean for long-term health.

Subject of Research: Persistent toxic metal exposure and pulmonary impairment among residents affected by the 2023 Maui wildfires

Article Title: EMBARGOED: Toxic metals found in Maui residents months after 2023 wildfires, UH study finds

Article References: EMBARGOED: Toxic metals found in Maui residents months after 2023 wildfires, UH study finds. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Maui wildfires, Lahaina, toxic metals, biomonitoring, lung function, arsenic, cadmium, antimony, wildland-urban interface, environmental health, University of Hawaii, PNAS