George Chacko

George Chacko is Associate Professor of Finance and teaches classes in Corporate Finance and Mergers & Acquisitions. He has been at Santa Clara University in the Finance department since 2006 and has taught courses in Investments, Capital Markets, and Financial Derivatives in the past. He has served as Director of the MS in Finance, Faculty Director of Graduate Programs, Finance Department Chair, and Associate Dean. His research interests are wide-ranging but have generally been in the areas of 1) capital markets (especially the microstructure of financial markets), 2) financial security design, 3) the management of financial institutions ranging from banks and insurance companies to public and private funds (hedge, private equity, real estate, pension etc.), and 4) the interplay between financial markets, financial securities, and financial institutions.

He has always shared his time between the academic and commercial worlds during his career. His commercial experience has included early stints at Accenture and Prudential Investments. More recently he was a managing director heading fixed income sales and trading at State Street Bank; a managing director heading pension asset management at IFL; and the chief investment officer of hedge fund management for Auda Alternative Investments. He has also co-founded two financial services businesses and subsequently sold them to financial institutions. He has been a partner at HNC Advisors AG since 2010.

His past academic experience has been entirely at Harvard Business School where he served as a professor for nine years in the Finance department. He has a BS from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and an MA and PhD from Harvard University in Business Economics.