Ken D’Souza CFA Quantitative Investment Leader and Portfolio Manager
Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan 2026 Ai & Future of Finance Conference
Ken D’Souza, CFA, is a Managing Director and Portfolio Manager at PGIM Quantitative Solutions, where he is a senior leader within the firm’s Quantitative Equity team. He oversees the portfolio managers and analysts responsible for approximately $60 billion across the Quantitative Equity platform, with responsibilities spanning portfolio management, investment research, quantitative analysis, and the continued development of systematic investment strategies.
D’Souza brings more than two decades of experience combining quantitative research, fundamental investment analysis, engineering, and portfolio management. Before joining PGIM, he was a Portfolio Manager at Batterymarch Financial Management, where he worked on emerging-market equities and integrated quantitative and fundamental approaches to security selection and portfolio construction. During his tenure, he was part of a team that helped grow assets in Emerging Market Large Cap strategies from approximately $4.5 billion to $12 billion. His work included developing factor models, building large-scale financial analytics platforms, improving stock-model diagnostics, and conducting macroeconomic research across regions, countries, and sectors.
His investment career is grounded in an unusually strong engineering and analytical background. Earlier in his career, D’Souza spent more than six years at Honeywell as an engineer and supervisor, managing a polymerization operation with approximately $330 million in annual sales and supervising a large industrial workforce. He applied financial modeling, discounted cash-flow analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, and quantitative optimization to capital allocation, product strategy, and manufacturing processes. His technical work included developing models that reduced process waste and using computational methods to analyze complex chemical and fluid-dynamics problems.
D’Souza has also been deeply involved in the professional quantitative-investment community. He is a Board Member and Past President of the Society of Quantitative Analysts (SQA), an organization dedicated to advancing education and communication among quantitative investment professionals. He previously served as Chair of the Board of Directors of CFA Society New York and remains closely connected to the broader investment-management community. His professional leadership reflects a longstanding commitment to bringing practitioners, academics, and investment researchers together around advances in quantitative finance.
In academia, D’Souza has lectured on Financial Risk Management at Columbia University, contributing his practitioner perspective to the education of students studying financial markets, risk, and quantitative investment.
D’Souza’s academic background spans engineering, quantitative management, and finance. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, an MS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he graduated as an Amy and Richard F. Wallman Scholar and was recognized among the top 5% of his class.
With a career spanning engineering, quantitative research, portfolio management, and professional leadership, Ken D’Souza represents a distinctive bridge between advanced analytical methods and practical investment management. His work sits at the intersection of quantitative equity research, systematic portfolio construction, fundamental analysis, and the application of sophisticated mathematical and computational techniques to real-world financial markets.
