Professor Joseph Cherian’s career reads like a blueprint for the kind of leader of whom business schools often write case studies but rarely get to hire.

 

An electrical engineer by training, an academic quant by profession, and now chief executive officer, president and dean of the Asia School of Business (ASB) in Malaysia, Cherian has traversed the worlds of engineering, global finance and education.

 

From his new office overlooking the heart of Kuala Lumpur, the former Wall Street quant reflects on a journey that has taken him from the corridors of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to the ivy-clad walls of Cornell University to the fast-paced trading floors of New York, and now, to educational transformation in Malaysia.

 

Through it all, one principle has remained constant: “I’m very hands-on and experiential,” Cherian says in an interview with Asia Asset Management. “It’s always been my guiding philosophy, probably part of my DNA from MIT.”

His mission is no less ambitious than it was on Wall Street: to build a world-class, Asia-focused business school that prepares future leaders not just for boardrooms, but for an era of artificial intelligence, disruption and global complexity.

Cherian’s academic path began with electrical engineering at MIT, where he also picked up a minor in economics, almost by accident.

 

“I went to MIT thinking economics was a soft, subjective field,” he recalls. “But then I saw the rigour. The systematic thinking. It reminded me of stochastic control theory in engineering, where you constantly and dynamically adjust to new circumstances, information, and inputs under conditions of uncertainty.”

 

Later in life, he delved into Mertonian finance, the continuous-time finance theory pioneered by Nobel laureate Professor Robert C. Merton of MIT, co-creator of the Black-Scholes/Merton option pricing model.

 

Cherian became increasingly fascinated with financial risk and decision making. That led him to pursue a PhD in quantitative finance. Then came a decade in academia before his first bold pivot: Wall Street.

 

“Most academics go to Europe or another university for their sabbatical. I told my dean in 1999, ‘I’m going to Wall Street’. I wanted to apply theory to the real world,” he says. The dean, a rare practitioner in academic leadership in those days, agreed almost immediately to his proposal.

Cherian later joined Credit Suisse Asset Management in New York and built what became a US$67 billion quant group – considered fairly large at the time – using academic models to manage real-world portfolios. But this wasn’t high-frequency, black-box trading.

 

“We weren’t doing what the renowned high-frequency hedge fund firms like Renaissance Technologies or D.E. Shaw did. Everything was based on sound academic, financial economic and Mertonian finance principles,” he says.

 

Even so, he quickly saw the pitfalls of blind faith in models, citing the collapse of various famous quant hedge funds as a cautionary tale.

 

“Their models were usually very good,” he says. “But many forgot about the little things, like liquidity risk management. When an extreme crisis happens, spreads usually widen. A hedge fund with limited, yet leveraged, capital, can’t hold on. Margin calls usually kill them. That was a defining moment for me.”

 

Unlike many quants who refuse to deviate from theoretical assumptions, Cherian adopted a pragmatic approach: understand the limits of financial models and adapt dynamically. That agility became his signature, both on the trading floor and in the classroom.

Wall Street offered Cherian more than financial success. It also sharpened his sense of ethical responsibility. As fund managers jetted off to Super Bowl parties on brokers’ dime, Cherian was already enforcing a no-frills policy within his global team.

 

“No five-star dinners. No private jet rides. You want to pitch trades? Bring bagels and cream cheese to our office,” he says, noting that the approach paid off when Eliot Spitzer, the then attorney general of New York, cracked down on soft-dollar kickbacks and other fund management shenanigans in the early 2000s.

 

“My team thanked me,” he says. “They realised we were protected. Not because we feared prosecution, but because we did the right thing for our clients, which included pension funds and retail investors.”

 

It’s a philosophy he has carried into teaching: that fiduciary duty − to pensioners, sovereign wealth funds, and retail clients − is sacred. “It’s not about how much money you can make off someone. It’s about how much value you can deliver.”

With his track record, Cherian could have easily launched his own hedge fund, but never did.

 

“It wasn’t about the money. I was more interested in building systems that worked. Fixing, growing, scaling − those were my challenges. Not chasing unicorn dreams.”

Cherian joined ASB, a collaboration between the MIT Sloan School of Management and Malaysia’s central bank, in 2022, and was appointed as the CEO in May this year. He is confident that ASB can become one of the top business schools in Asia.

 

According to Cherian, the school stands out for its focus on emerging markets and on real-world impact, unlike other elite institutions in Asia that teach global frameworks but offer little regional application.

 

“We’re using world class tools to solve Asian and emerging market problems,” he says. “Whether it’s monetary policy, pension reform, supply chain operations management, yield enhancement in agriculture, or green infrastructure finance − our curriculum is rooted in the region.”

 

His goal is to position the school as a globally recognised institution known for excellence in both teaching and research. “When a parent in India, China, or Indonesia thinks about sending their child to a top business school in Asia, I want ASB to be top of mind.”

 

He says his students, many of whom are mid-career professionals, don’t just read textbooks or attend lectures. In their finance classes for example, they download raw hedge fund data, run regressions, and determine whether returns are driven by alpha or beta.

 

“They watch my pre-recorded lectures anytime they want. But they must attend my Sunday live sessions,” he says. “That’s when we apply the theory, run simulations and do fun real-world applications. No shortcuts.”

 

He’s proud of ASB’s ACE or agile continuous education model, a blend of asynchronous learning via videos combined with real-time, hands-on lab work that he describes as an “MIT-style experiential education with deep Asian content”. He says the model is so good that an MIT dean has joked that she’d like to replicate it at the school.

Cherian isn’t among those who predict that artificial intelligence poses a threat to entry-level jobs in finance. At least, not to those who are willing to adapt.

 

“AI will replace tasks, not necessarily people, unless those people refuse to upskill,” he says. “Fresh graduates need to go beyond learning rote skills and understand the limitations of models. That’s where humans still have an edge.”

 

He warns that relying solely on AI-driven financial advice can be dangerously generic. “Ask ChatGPT to build a portfolio − it won’t necessarily account for the interactions between your age, your real estate holdings, and your human capital, your wage income stability, your portfolio’s asset allocation and the passage of time. That’s where trained judgement still matters.”

 

Cherian sees Malaysia not just as a home base but as a springboard for regional and global influence. “ASB has to serve Malaysia, yes, but we can’t survive if we only serve Malaysia,” he says. “Our content is portable. What we teach here can be applied in the Middle East, China, Japan, and Latin America.”