Mike Chen

Dr. Mike Chen is the head of next generation research at Robeco. In this role, he is responsible for leading the research and development of innovative alpha insights and solutions across Robeco, and commercialization of Robeco’s next-generation quant products. Mike’s current research interests are in the areas machine learning/NLP, alternative data, and quant sustainability. He has published a number of journal articles on these topics. Mike is also a lecturer at MIT Sloan for the course Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Finance.

Previously, Mike was the head of sustainable investments at PanAgora. In that role, he led the research and development of sustainable investment solutions across PanAgora, and the commercialization of PanAgora’s ESG offerings. In addition, he is responsible for model research and development in the Equity Division while participating in the daily management of the firm’s portfolios.
While at PanAgora, Mike developed and applied for a patent for a framework to construct sustainable portfolios based on dual objectives of alpha and sustainability outperformance.

Prior to joining PanAgora, Mike was a portfolio manager at BlackRock’s Scientific Active Equity (SAE) team, where his responsibilities include portfolio management and research into alpha insights for use across the entire SAE platform. While at SAE, Mike won the “Signal of the Year” award for a signal he researched and developed.

Mike started his career at Morgan Stanley in New York where he traded and managed a portfolio of exotic US rates derivatives. While at Morgan Stanley, Mike researched, developed, and patented a framework that allowed for the pricing of derivatives based on two rate curves with dynamic multiplicative spread, one of the first such models on the street.

Mike graduated from the University of Illinois in 2005 with a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering. During graduate school, he has published in leading academic engineering and applied mathematics journals, and had been invited to talk at numerous academic and industry conferences.