I'm using PyCharm CE as my development environment, on a macintosh running mac OS 10.12.3.
Ah, that would explain why my intuitions were all wrong - I know how the Windows and *nix installation models work (and I believe the latter also covers homebrew on macOS), but not how the macOS framework installers work :)
While pip+wheels should cover most of your needs for financial analytics in Python these days, it may still be worth your while to spend a bit of time poking around at conda if you think you may ever need components written in other languages like R: https://conda.io/docs/
Cheers,
Nick.
P.S. As far as your research topic goes, while I'm not aware of anyone specifically researching tensorflow in that context, looking through Dr Yves Hilpisch's publication list at http://hilpisch.com/#/11 may point you towards events where that kind of material may have been presented.