Mike Chen

Head of Alternative Alpha Research

Robeco

Dr. Chen is the Head of Alternative Alpha Research at Robeco. In this role, he is responsible for leading the research and development of innovative alpha insights and solutions for use across Robeco. He started in this role in March, 2022. Dr. Chen’s current research interests are in the areas of quant sustainability, machine learning/NLP, and alternative data, and has published a number of journal articles in these topics.

Previously, Dr. Chen 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 daily management of firm’s portfolios. While at PanAgora, Dr. Chen developed and applied for a patent for a framework to construct sustainable portfolios based on dual objectives of alpha and sustainability out performance.

Prior to joining PanAgora, Dr. Chen 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, Dr. Chen won “Signal of the Year” award for a signal he researched and developed.

Dr. Chen 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, Dr. Chen researched, developed and patented a framework that allowed for pricing of derivatives based on two rate curves with dynamic multiplicative spread, one of the first such models on the street. 

Dr. Chen 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.