The Wharton School announced the admission of an inaugural cohort of students to a quantitative asset management master’s program last week.
The one-year program, open exclusively to Wharton juniors, consists of six required courses, four electives, and an applied research component. The Dr. Bruce I. Jacobs Master of Science in Quantitative Finance Program cohort will enroll in master’s classes in the fall and are set to graduate in May 2028.
Finance professor David Musto, the program’s faculty director, said that they are “looking for students who are quantitatively trained and quantitatively minded,” in an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian.
“It’s nice for us to be able to bring that graduate study of quant finance back home,” Musto added.
The Jacobs MSQF Program was first announced in September 2025 following the largest single donation in Penn’s history — $60 million from Bruce Jacobs, a 1979 College graduate, 1986 Wharton Ph.D. graduate, and former Wharton faculty member.
“Bruce Jacobs has been incredibly supportive and instrumental in getting our quantitative finance efforts expanded over the years,” finance professor Nikolai Roussanov told the DP.
This initiative was created to prepare students for “highly competitive roles in quantitative finance” while also “saving time and cost.”
Musto added that its only “real hard requirement” — aside from participants being “finance curious” — is having a sufficient background in math.
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“We’re looking at people who’ve taken the math, have the quantum experience, and then embark on a course of study to prepare them for the quant workplace,” Musto said. “It’s a different track, aimed at different pockets of demand out there in the workforce.”
Jacobs MSQF faculty are currently planning the program’s curriculum, but will focus core classes on financial derivatives, fixed income securities, and investment management, along with data science and asset pricing.
“This master’s program is a new initiative that we have been working on as a department for quite a long time because there is this growing trend in the industry of relying on both analytical finance skills and heavily on data,” Roussanov explained.
Students are encouraged to begin taking the program’s core courses in their senior year before moving on to specialized electives the next year. They will all participate in a related internship during the summer after completing their bachelor’s degree.
Enrolled students will also complete a research project addressing a quantitative asset challenge faced by real-world management firms.
Finance professor Stephan Dieckmann, the program’s deputy director, told the DP that the program should academically prepare students to “really understand the skills these roles require on a theoretical level and applied level.”
In a September 2025 statement to the DP, Jacobs wrote that he was motivated to create the program to support “the next generation of leaders in the asset management industry.”
This donation is the latest in Jacobs’ contributions to expanding Penn’s quantitative finance programs. In September 2011, Jacobs, along with 1982 Wharton graduate Kenneth Levy, gifted $12 million to create the Jacobs Levy Equity Management Center for Quantitative Financial Research and the Wharton-Jacobs Levy Prize for Quantitative Financial Innovation. In April 2020, he donated $12 million to fund a quantitative finance major for Wharton MBA students.
