Trang T Chu
Trang founded Affective Advisors to transform how emotion is understood in leadership and decision-making. Her work sits at the intersection of emotion science, decision-making and executive coaching. She draws on more than thirty years of commercial and advisory experience, together with doctoral research in affective and decision science, to help clients lead and make decisions more adaptively in complex, high-stakes situations.
Trang spent more than twenty years in global capital markets, latterly as Managing Director and Head of Global Capital Markets, Asset & Wealth Management at Deutsche Bank, and previously as Managing Director and Head of the Financial Products Group, EMEA, at Merrill Lynch. She led businesses spanning structuring, trading and origination, working with flow and derivative-linked products. Her earlier roles included structuring equity derivatives at Salomon Smith Barney and project finance at Lehman Brothers.
This experience gives her a practical understanding of the pressures her clients operate under, from visible P&L and fast-moving risk to leadership transitions, strategic judgement and decision-making under uncertainty.
Trang’s doctoral research at University College London’s Faculty of Brain Sciences examines how language shapes emotional experience and how that experience shapes judgement and choice.
She teaches at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, where she is an Associate Fellow, and at Imperial College London, where she lectures in emotions, heuristics and decision-making.
She holds an MSc in Cognitive and Decision Science from UCL, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and a BSc in Economics from NYU Stern.
