A Landmark Milestone: EDHEC's PhD in Finance Celebrates Its 100th Graduate
The EDHEC Business School PhD in Finance, launched in 2008, has reached a milestone with its 100th graduate. Designed for experienced finance professionals, the programme combines academic rigour with practical expertise. Over nearly two decades, it has enabled senior practitioners from around the world to turn their industry experience into high-level work, strengthening the connection between theory and practice in finance.
Since its launch in 2008, the EDHEC Business School PhD in Finance has built a reputation as one of the most demanding and distinctive programmes for experienced finance professionals. Today, we are proud to celebrate a milestone that reflects the strength of this journey: our 100th graduate.
Over nearly two decades, one hundred talented minds from across the globe have completed this rigorous programme, each bringing years of professional experience, and each leaving with something rarer: the ability to question, to build, and to contribute to the advancement of finance in a more structured and meaningful way.
A programme built for experienced practitioners
In 2008, EDHEC made an unusual bet: to offer a PhD in Finance not to young researchers, but to practitioners already well established in their careers. People with 15 or 20 years of experience in markets, portfolio management, and complex structuring behind them. People whose convictions had been shaped by experience, and who agreed to subject those convictions to the pressure of systematic doubt.
Designed for senior practitioners seeking higher intellectual achievement, the EDHEC PhD in Finance sits at the intersection of academic rigour and real-world relevance. Participants come from investment banking, asset management, and other key sectors of the financial industry, and through close faculty guidance and demanding training, they transform their professional expertise into work that is both intellectually compelling and professionally impactful.
100 thesis defences. 100 stories.
That number deserves to be read for what it is: roughly six graduates a year. The programme has intentionally remained selective, allowing for close academic supervision and a deeply personalised research experience.
Behind every thesis lies a personal story of balancing ambitious careers, personal commitments, and the intellectual discipline required to sustain years of rigorous research. One hundred defences, each marking the culmination of resilience and relentless curiosity.
These graduates are not simply alumni. They are the strength of this programme.
Perhaps no one captures it better than those who have lived it. Anaïs Fernoux, our 100th graduate, embodies everything this programme set out to create.
"Becoming the 100th PhD of this programme is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life - not just as a number, but as a reminder of how much I was willing to push myself, and of everything that made that possible.
I came to this programme already shaped by years of professional practice, and academia asked me to prove instincts I had spent years building. Learning to hold a practitioner's perspective alongside scholarly rigour, and to let each strengthen the other, gave my research a depth I don't think I could have found any other way - and that I know I wouldn't have found straight out of a master's degree.
Doing this part-time is harder than it sounds. There were moments where I questioned whether I could keep going. But the programme's structure held me. The first two years quietly built something solid: a theoretical foundation, a way of reading, a discipline of thought. I didn't always see the point in the moment. Looking back, I see it everywhere.
What this journey taught me is that knowledge alone is not enough. What endures is the quality of the people: a supervisor who pushed me to think more carefully, peers who became genuine friends, and an administration that quietly made everything possible. A PhD is never really a solo endeavour - I just got lucky with the people in mine" - Anaïs Fernoux, PhD in Finance Graduate, Senior Portfolio Manager at CA Indosuez Fund Solutions' Private Markets team.
Hear from more of our graduates and discover what drove them to take this step.
A community that endures
The impact of the EDHEC PhD in Finance extends well beyond graduation. Over the years, our graduates have made a wide range of contributions to the field: applying their work to reshape industry practices, raising professional standards, enriching academic knowledge as faculty members, and building meaningful bridges between finance theory and practice.
What is equally encouraging is the community that has taken shape across cohorts, countries, and careers. Small by design, spread across sectors, but connected by a shared experience that is not easy to replicate elsewhere. A close-knit and engaged network, staying connected, exchanging on professional and personal milestones, and continuing to embody what this programme set out to create back in 2008: a formative environment for highly experienced and ambitious finance professionals.
To our 100 graduates: congratulations, and thank you for being part of this remarkable journey.
Here's to the next 100.
