Karren Khaw is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Finance at the School of Business, Monash University Malaysia. She holds a doctoral degree from Massey University, New Zealand, fully sponsored by the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia. She has previously worked with the University of Waikato, based at its joint institute (NZUWI) in Hangzhou, China, and the University of Malaya and Universiti Utara Malaysia.

Her research interests lie in corporate finance, focusing primarily on corporate risk-taking, corporate governance, corporate policies, debt financing structures, investment efficiency, and multinational corporations. She has also ventured into ESG and sustainable finance. Her notable research outputs are published in the Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance, Finance Research Letters, Emerging Markets Review, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, and Journal of Economic Surveys.

She actively contributes her expertise as a journal subject editor and reviewer. For research grants, she has completed six grants (four as principal investigator and two as co-investigator). She is leading two ongoing grants related to sustainable growth among Malaysian SMEs and sustainable finance.

Karren has taught various finance courses at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, such as Cases in Finance, Corporate Finance, Entrepreneurial Finance, Investment Analysis, International Financial Management, Fixed Income Markets and Instruments, and Managerial Finance. At Monash, she is assigned to teach credit analysis and lending. Consistently, she received positive feedback on her teaching approaches. She was awarded a Purple Letter and Blue Letter for teaching excellence and an ESSFS award for the extra-large class category, both in 2023, along with an NZUWI teaching award in 2022 and an Excellent Service Award in 2016.

In terms of supervision, she has successfully supervised four doctoral students and eight master's students to completion. Additionally, she has experience holding administrative positions at the school and national levels. Nationally, she has served as the Assistant Secretary (2018/2019), Honorary Secretary (2019/2021), and Exco (2023/2025) of the Malaysian Finance Association. Karren is also actively engaged in sustainability-related activities.

• Corporate risk-taking
• Corporate governance
• CSR, ESG
• Debt financing 
• Institutional investors
• Multinational corporations
• Sustainable finance