Sarah Hammer, Esq.

Sarah Hammer is Executive Director at the Wharton School. She leads strategic initiatives across Finance at Wharton and is CEO of Wharton Cypher Accelerator. Hammer is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Affiliated Scholar at the Penn Program on Regulation.

Hammer is Co-Chair of the International Expert Consortium on AI. She chairs AI conferences in Davos, Geneva, Berlin, and Washington, DC. She is Co-Editor of the forthcoming Oxford University Press Handbook on Generative AI and regularly publishes and speaks about AI.

Hammer is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee and an advisor at the World Economic Forum, the Dubai International Finance Centre, and the Digital Dollar Project for Central Bank Digital Currency. Hammer was a board member of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) at the UN.

Hammer was Acting Secretary of the Department of Banking and Securities for Pennsylvania and led the Department through the banking crisis of March 2023. The Department regulates and supervises ~290,000 bank and non-bank financial entities, totaling $3.5 trillion in AUM.

Hammer was also Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at US Treasury. In this role, she led the Office of Financial Institutions Policy, the Federal Insurance Office, and the Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Compliance Policy (cybersecurity).

At US Treasury, Hammer led the cross-functional team conducting a comprehensive report on the financial regulatory framework. Hammer also served on the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) board and was principal staff to the Treasury Secretary for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC).

Hammer has held leadership positions throughout financial services in general management, portfolio management, trading, marketing, research, and analytics at the Vanguard Group, PIMCO, JP Morgan Chase, BlackRock, and Tudor Investments.

Hammer earned a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, an MBA from the Wharton School, and a Master of Studies from Oxford University.