[tansey]

The type of quants talked about in this article probably has a PhD in math, stats, CS (with a focus on machine learning), or something similar.

[Akababa]

This particular article is about MFE students from one school, but hedge funds love PhDs too.

[sukilot]

and especially physics, since financial modeling is based on physical modeling.

[curiousgal]

Well not directly, it's just that they both make use of stochastic calculus.

[melling]

Any good MOOCs, etc for the topic?