Expert resume of Jonathan Schachter, Ph.D

Jonathan Schachter is CEO of Delta Vega (New York). Services include quant analysis of complex traded products, expert witnessing, training, and related consulting. A former astrophysicist at Harvard University, he specializes in model risk management and is a textbook author. Expertise includes AI, financial regulation, and structured products.

Jonathan Schachter, Ph.D. is CEO of Delta Vega, Inc. (New York), a financial engineering consultancy. His 25 years of Wall Street experience include sell side, buy side, and fintech work. The central focus has been analysis of complex products including derivatives and structured products, from both pricing and risk management perspectives.

Jonathan trains MA level students in financial engineering, including Columbia and Stony Brook Universities. He provides training in a wide range of risk management topics for practitioners and “nearest neighbors” (including bank CPAs who may earn continuing education credit). He holds regular free zoom sessions in his Special Topics of Risk Management (STORM) series, and has a subscription service to view past episodes. He speaks frequently on current quant topics.

Past clients have included large banks (e.g., Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Citi), asset managers (e.g., Blackrock, State Street), NGOs (e.g., World Bank, AFDB, Canadian Wheat Board, Farm Credit Canada), NumeriX, and Big Four Firms. Career highlights include the pricing of CDOs, NTDs and recovery locks for Lehman Brothers post bankruptcy, reinforcing JP Morgan’s risk systems in the aftermath of the London Whale episode, and obtaining US regulatory approval for Morgan Stanley’s introduction of an EWMA VaR model.

Jonathan is lead author of the graduate level textbook, “A First Course in Model Validation and Model Risk Management” (Academic Press). Key chapters discuss both pricing and risk models, including risks in markets credit (ratings, counterparty risk, and correlation), operational processes, portfolios, AI, capital, and financial crime. From 1990-2000, Jonathan was an astrophysicist at Harvard University, part of the team that tested and launched NASA’s Chandra X-ray Satellite. He holds a bachelors degree in Physics from Princeton University, a Ph.D. in Physics from The University of California at Berkeley, and an M.A. in Mathematical Finance from Columbia University.