Jeff Zilka

About Jeff Zilka

Jeff is an award-winning strategic financial communicator with 30+ years’ experience advising managements and boards of U.S. and overseas companies, VC and PE sponsors, alternative and traditional asset managers, and financial institutions. Formerly co-head of Edelman’s U.S. financial offering and general manager of its Chicago Financial Communications & Investor Relations group, Jeff counsels clients in five areas – strategic transactions, investor relations, financial services marketing, corporate and financial media relations, and financial enforcement actions and litigation. He has led communications teams in scores of U.S. and cross-border transactions including friendly and contested mergers and acquisitions, activist engagements, proxy fights, spin-offs, IPOs, restructurings, and bankruptcies. Jeff began his career in New York as an investment banker with PaineWebber and bond trader with Lehman Brothers. Before moving to Chicago in 1993, he was head of investor relations for an FTSE-100 company, based in London. Jeff\'s articles on corporate governance, investor relations, market structure, and strategic transactions have appeared in Barron’s, The Deal, IR Quarterly, IR Update and NASDAQ International. He serves on the Investment Committee of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, lectures on investor activism at Northwestern Kellogg\'s Corporate Governance Program and was the founding president of the Chicago chapter of the Financial Communications Society.

Experience

1. Senior Counselor

   Edelman Smithfield

   Oct 2017 — Present · Chicago, IL, US

Education

• Cornell University

  Bachelor of Science (BS), Labor and Industrial Relations

  1972 — 1976

• NYU Stern School of Business

  Master of Business Administration (MBA), Finance, General

  1977 — 1979