Fabrice Tourre always had a fondness for intellectual masturbation. Once upon a time, his, uh, efforts resulted in “monstruosities” whose “implications” he didn’t “necessarily understand,” but which did help torpedo the global economy and his Fabulousness’ Wall Street career. Since then, and since his unfortunate run-in with a New York federal jury, Fab’s been holed up in academia, still intellectually masturbating but with less civil liability attached, possibly working towards and understanding of the “complex, highly leveraged exotic trades” he was throwing together in his heyday. And in the not-always-hospitable ivory tower, he’s even found something he might be better at than building synthetic CDOs: TAing.

Mr. Tourre received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago after the financial crisis and is conducting postdoctoral research at Northwestern University. He has studied how markets price risk in debt securities and was a teaching assistant in a course on asset pricing for Professor George Constantinides at the University of Chicago.

“The reason I picked him up was because he was the top student when I taught the course the previous year,” Prof. Constantinides said. “As a TA, you want to be empathetic and help the students, and he did that very well.

Goldman Mortgage Trader Convicted of Fraud Pursuing New Career in Academia [WSJ]