For more than three decades, Johannes Kohler has tracked and reacted to some of the biggest shifts in the financial markets — from the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s to the dot-com bubble to the post 9/11 crash to the Great Recession.
He has stories and has learned lessons that today’s finance students — who’ve never seen a bear market — can hardly believe. As a senior lecturer in the finance department at the Terry College of Business, his job is to bridge the gap between Broad Street and Wall Street and help students learn the structure of the modern stock and bond markets.
“The students love to have someone who has worked in the capital markets, who knows how a bank works, especially an investment bank,” Kohler said. “There are so many anecdotes I can share during my lectures — stuff that I’ve experienced at different companies and through different times.”
Kohler, who has taught finance at Terry College since 2018, also serves as coach and advisor to the Terry College Student Managed Investment Fund and the Corsair Society. He’s helped hundreds of students launch careers in finance and has helped bolster UGA’s reputation as a top finance school.
In 2025, his hours of work with students helping them build their professional foundations earned him the Terry College’s Instructional Excellence Award.
Kohler’s journey to investment banks in London and Frankfurt to a classroom in the Terry College Business Learning Community started just across Lumpkin Street in Brooks Hall.
Kohler, who grew up in northwestern Germany and attended Universität Osnabrück for his bachelor’s degree, received the German equivalent of a Boren or Gilman scholarship to study in the United States. By luck, the program placed him at UGA, specifically the Ph.D. program in finance.
He fell in love with UGA, with Athens in the 1980s, and with his wife of 35 years, Lisa, who grew up in Five Points.
Their plan always involved coming back to Athens, but top jobs at JP Morgan, Meryll Lynch and Morgan Stanley kept Kohler in Europe for the first half of his career.
Around 2015, it was time for a change of pace, and Kohler came back to teaching and to UGA.
“The quality of the university, the quality of the students, where it is, the history of it — it’s just a great place to be,” Kohler said. “I’m so grateful to be able to be here and grateful also for the university and for the finance department to have given me this opportunity.”
As the advisor to the Student Managed Investment Fund, Kohler helps coach 55 students who manage the $4.1 million donor-endowed Athena Fund, which represents 40 individual stock holdings across 11 industry sectors.
In 2025, he helped to launch the SMIF Arch Bond Fund, a $1.5 million donor-endowed bond portfolio that is managed by 33 students.
The Arch Bond Fund is one of the first student-run bond funds in the country because bond management is much more technical than stock trading, Kohler explained. So far, the students have exceeded his expectations.
“We started this from scratch,” Kohler said. “We had no template. We had no input or examples from other universities that were doing this.”
In addition to working with the funds, Kohler has helped UGA’s SMIF turn its annual Stock Pitch Competition into one of the biggest in the Southeast. Each year, as many as 100 teams from schools as far as the University of California, Berkley and Yale University compete for 16 spots at the in-person stock finals in Athens.
Whether teaching or mentoring Corsair Society or SMIF students, Kohler often finds himself fielding emails and calls after hours and on the weekends. Students say that he’s always available for career advice or to talk over market sentiment.
“The students want to learn,” Kohler said. “When they respond to your teaching, you get so much positive feedback. I don’t mind investing my time or working weekends. It’s just so rewarding.”
And it’s paying off for the students as well, as more prestigious banks and investment houses book recruiting trips to Athens to interview UGA finance students for top jobs.
For Kohler, the experience of teaching at Terry is a full-circle moment that links his past to his present.
“I still walk by Brooks Hall, where the business school used to be on campus,” Kohler said. “The other day, I noticed a group of students sitting out on the benches just like I did 40 years ago. It’s just awesome; it’s my career and life coming full circle.”
