Master of Financial Engineering

Patrick Augustin is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Macrofinance and Derivatives and is an Associate Fellow at the Canadian Derivatives Institute. He holds a PhD degree in Finance from the Stockholm School of Economics, and held visiting research positions at the New York University Stern School of Business, the Stockholm School of Economics, the University of Sydney, and the Luxembourg School of Finance. He is certified as Financial Risk Manager by the Global Association of Risk Professionals, and served as a Fellow at the Global Future Councils of the World Economic Forum. Before joining academia, he worked as a structured credit officer at Dexia and as attaché to the Luxembourg Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Patrick’s research interests lie at the intersection of macroeconomics and financial markets with a focus on sovereign credit risk, firm fundamentals and credit risk with a focus on credit derivatives, and law and finance with a focus on insider trading. His work has been published in the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Monetary Economics, Management Science, and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, among others. His work has been widely covered in the financial press, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Fortune, and The Globe and Mail.

Alexander Dill teaches Financial Market Regulation in UCLA’s Anderson School of Management’s Master of Financial Engineering program and Financial Institution Compliance at the UCLA School of Law. He also teaches financial regulation, risk management, and compliance in the University of Chicago’s Financial Mathematics program. He worked in the finance industry since 1986, leaving it in 2015 to begin a career in academia. He spent most of his career at Moody’s Investors Service, where he held a number of positions, which included Head of Global Covenant Research, Senior Credit Officer in Moody’s Structured Finance Group, and Moody’s Global Ratings Compliance Officer for Structured Finance. He helped design and implement a first-of-its-kind ratings compliance system to address conflicts in the credit ratings process in the aftermath of the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals. Prior to Moody’s, he was a Branch Chief in Trading Practices at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C. He began his law career in New York, specializing in secured lending, bankruptcy issues, and bank regulatory matters.

He has published numerous articles on financial regulation, compliance, and risk management.  He has been interviewed by Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal and has published an op-ed in the Financial Times. His two books are Anti-Money Laundering Regulation and Compliance: Key Issues and Problem Areas (Edward Elgar: 2021) and Bank Regulation, Risk Management, and Compliance: Theory, Key Issues, and Problem Areas (Routledge: 2019).

Benjamin Tsai (MBA '01) is the Co-Founder, President & Managing Partner at Wave Financial, an SEC registered investment advisor focused on blockchain and cryptocurrencies with over $1B assets under management. Based in Los Angeles, he serves as the creator and portfolio manager to Wave's Kentucky Whiskey Fund, Select 5 Crypto Fund, BTC Income & Growth Fund, and other strategies for wealth management.

Previously, Ben served as the Head of Alternative Investments Asia Pacific at AllianceBernstein for 3 years. His finance career started at (Bank of America) Merrill Lynch, where he spent 12 years stationed in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore, running derivative products desks for both equity and fixed income, subsequently the commodities desk. He has a BS from UC Berkeley, MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA.

Honors/Awards: TADS Best in Class Asset Backed Token Award for Wave Kentucky Whiskey 2020 Digital Fund

Current and past securities licenses:

• US FINRA Series 3, 7, 65
• Hong Kong SFC Type 1, 2, 4, 9
• JSDA Level I, II, Internal Administrator
• Singapore MAS Registered Representative
• Taiwan SITCA Registered Representative