And, as a first-year assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the School of Engineering in New Brunswick, he’s now doing it at Rutgers. The Chinese émigré, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington, was recruited with the support of the $1 million Peter and Peggy Cherasia Fund, which helps build the engineering school’s faculty.
“To the extent that research and development, getting grants, and bringing in quality professors helps to drive forward both the undergraduate and graduate programs, this fund will help the school attract very talented professors,” says Peter Cherasia, head of markets strategies at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
Although Cherasia graduated with an electrical engineering degree from Rutgers in 1984, he quickly got into finance, where he’s applied the skills he acquired at Rutgers—“breaking things down into constituent components and then adding them back up”—to ascend the investment-banking ranks. The fund, he says, is his way of perpetuating the engineering school’s ongoing progress.
