Sold Out: A Celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Pioneering Portfolio Management

Kerwin joined Yale in 2019 as the Indra K. Nooyi Dean and Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Economics, Policy, and Management at the Yale School of Management (SOM). He moved to Yale from the University of Chicago, where he was the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergmann Distinguished Service professor. He has studied and published on a range of topics in labor and applied economics. Among other professional duties, he has served as the vice president of the American Economics Association and is on the Board of several academic and nonprofit entities. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is an elected Fellow of the Society of Labor Economics; of the American Academy of Political and Social Science; and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Robert Wallace is the Chief Executive Officer of Stanford Management Company, where he oversees Stanford University's $43 billion investment portfolio. Prior to joining Stanford in 2015, Mr. Wallace was the chief executive officer of Alta Advisers, a London-based investment firm that pursues a global and diversified investment strategy on behalf of one of Europe’s most philanthropic families. Mr. Wallace's investment career began at the Yale Investments Office at Yale University, where he also received a degree in economics, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. 

Prior to his work in investment management, Mr. Wallace was a classical ballet dancer. His 16-year dance career began at the Washington Ballet, continued at American Ballet Theatre under the direction of Mikhail Baryshnikov, and concluded at the Boston Ballet. Mr. Wallace danced principal roles in substantially all of the great classical ballets. His repertoire in contemporary works included leading roles in ballets by Balanchine, Robbins, Tudor, De Mille, Tharp, Morris, York, Goh, Lubavitch, and Taylor.

Mr. Wallace is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Getty Museum’s Investment Committee. He has previously served as Trustee of the English National Ballet, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the Royal Ballet School. Mr. Wallace is married and has three grown children.

Charley Ellis served on David Swensen’s investment committee for 17 years and on a dozen other investment committees around the world. He has served as a Fellow of the Yale Corporation, Chair of Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, CFA Institute, and a trustee of Exeter, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A graduate of Exeter, he studied Art History at Yale, earned an MBA (with distinction) at Harvard Business School and a PhD at New York University. He has taught the advanced courses on investing multiple times at Harvard and Yale and was Director of the CFA Institute Investor Workshop at Princeton and has published 22 books and over 100 professional articles. He founded and, for thirty years led Greenwich Associates to global leadership.

Andrew “Commodore” Golden advises investment firms on strategy, organizational issues, and talent. He recently retired from serving as president of the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO), a position he held from 1995 to 2024. During this time, Andy oversaw an approximate ten-fold growth of Princeton’s endowment from an initial base of $3.5 billion, even while the endowment contributed almost $20 billion to Princeton’s annual budgets. The endowment’s growth and spending enabled the University to expand critical research and teaching areas, and notably helped finance Princeton’s pioneering no-loan financial aid program. The endowment’s 12.6% annualized investment return during Andy’s tenure ranked in the top percentile of gains by institutional asset owners.

The Commodore’s prior experience includes investment roles at Duke Management Company and Yale University. He was a professional photographer before he shifted his focus to investing. He holds an A.B. in philosophy from Duke University and an M.P.P.M. from the Yale School of Management, as well as a diploma from the American School of Bartending. A Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), Andy is a member of the investment advisory committees of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation and the Cambridge University Endowment Fund. He serves as a Trustee of the Rita Allen Foundation, the Simons Foundation, and Rutgers Preparatory School. He is a Director of the Park Agency, a family office.

Andy (or “Sparky” as he is sometimes known) received the Irving Kahn Lifetime Achievement Award from the CFA Society New York, and a similar award from Institutional Investor. And yet, he still has a hard time taking himself very seriously. He hopes to spend more time again making something resembling visual art. His recent work in triptychs can be viewed in his Instagram account: Sparky_Golden.

As Senior Vice President and Chief Investment Officer, Lauren Meserve oversees the management of the Museum's $3.4 billion investment portfolio, including asset allocation, investment manager selection, and risk management. She joined the Museum's investment team in 2002 and was named Chief Investment Officer in 2014.

Previously, Meserve worked at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where she assisted in the management of the foundation's endowment, collaborated on two books about higher education (The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions and The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values), and coordinated projects for Artstor. She began her career as an analyst at the Yale Investments Office, Yale University.

Meserve has a master's degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Yale University. She serves on the board of several non-profits, including the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Population Council, and American Friends of the National Gallery, London.

Richard Levin, the Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Economics Emeritus, served as President of Yale University from 1993 to 2013, during which time he rebuilt the campus, redeveloped downtown New Haven, purchased and developed a new West Campus, co-founded Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and launched scores of new international programs. From 2014 to 2017, he served as CEO of Coursera, a pioneering educational platform that offers 4,000 courses from top universities and companies to over 100 million registered learners, and thousands of enterprises and campuses worldwide. Levin is currently a Senior Adviser to Coursera, GSV Ventures, and the TPG Rise Fund, and a director of C3.ai, Analysis Group, Yale-NUS College, and the Yidan Prize Foundation. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds honorary doctorates from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Oxford, Peking, Tokyo, and Waseda Universities, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Seth Alexander is President of the MIT Investment Management Company (MITIMCo), a division of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  MITIMCo manages the Endowment, Retirement Plan, Retiree Welfare Benefit Plan, and other financial assets of MIT.  Mr. Alexander is a member of the Whitehead Institute Board, an investment committee member of the Board of Managers, and serves on the Board of Trustees for Newton-Wellesley Hospital. 

Lisa Howie joined Smith College in 2021 as the college’s first chief investment officer, playing a key role in bringing management of Smith’s endowment in-house. Prior to joining Smith, Howie served as a director in the Yale University Investments Office, where she spent nearly 13 years. At Yale, Howie was responsible for management of the university’s foreign public and private equity portfolios. Howie earned both her undergraduate degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry and her master’s in business administration from Yale. She serves on the investment committees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and The Ohio State University.

Prior to leading Yale Investments as CIO, Matt managed the Endowment’s venture capital portfolio and helped manage most of the assets in which Yale invests, notably leveraged buyouts and natural resources. Matt joined in 2007 upon graduating from Yale College with a BS in Physics. He is a CFA® charterholder, he taught endowment management at the Yale School of Management from 2013-18, and he is a Fellow of Berkeley College.

Bryan Kelly is the Frederick Frank ’54 and Mary C. Tanner Professor of Finance at the Yale School of Management, a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Associate Director of SOM’s International Center for Finance, and is the head of machine learning at AQR Capital Management, LLC.

Professor Kelly’s primary research fields are asset pricing and financial econometrics. He is interested in issues related to financial machine learning; volatility, tail risk, and correlation modeling in financial markets; banking sector systemic risk; financial intermediation; and financial networks. His papers in these areas have been published in American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. He is co-editor of the Journal of Financial Econometrics and associate editor of the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Financial Economics.

Before joining Yale, Kelly was a tenured professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Chicago, a master’s degree in economics from University of California San Diego, and a PhD in finance from New York University’s Stern School of Business. Kelly worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley prior to pursuing his PhD.

Tobias “Toby” Moskowitz was named the inaugural Dean Takahashi ’80 B.A., ’83 M.P.P.M. Professor of Finance at Yale SOM in 2016.

He was previously the Fama Family Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he had taught since 1998. Professor Moskowitz was recognized by the American Finance Association with its 2007 Fischer Black Prize, which is awarded biennially to the top finance scholar in the world under the age of 40 in years when one is deemed deserving. The award cited his “ingenious and careful use of newly available data to address fundamental questions in finance.”

His work has been cited in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Financial Times, US News and World Report, Money magazine, and a 2005 speech by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. He has also appeared on CNBC’s Closing Bell and Squawk Box, CNN, FOX, as well as Bloomberg.

Nancy Zimmerman is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Bracebridge Capital, a hedge fund with over $12 billion under management, and a pioneer in the field of absolute return investing. Bracebridge aims to diversify investment portfolios by generating attractive long-term returns that are largely uncorrelated with broad moves in equities, currencies and rates. Nancy is responsible for overall investment strategy and capital allocation for the Bracebridge funds and oversees risk management for the Boston-based firm. Prior to founding Bracebridge in 1994, Nancy managed the global interest rate option group at Goldman Sachs and began her career at O’Connor & Associates. Nancy received an A.B. in Economics from Brown University, where she serves as a Fellow of the Corporation and chairs the Carney Institute for Brain Science Advisory Council, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Social Finance US.

Alex joined Yale Investments in August 2006 after graduating with a BA in both Economics and Computer Science from Yale College, where he now co-teaches ECON 450: Investment Analysis. Alex focuses on the Endowment’s developed equities and marketable alternatives portfolios in addition to asset allocation and spending policy analysis. He became a CFA® charterholder in 2010 before choosing to become inactive in 2015.

Mr. Inker is Co-Head of GMO’s Asset Allocation team and a portfolio manager for the team’s products. Mr. Inker is a member of the GMO Board of Directors and a partner of the firm. He joined GMO in 1992 following the completion of his bachelor's degree in Economics from Yale University. In his years at GMO, Mr. Inker has served as an analyst for the Quantitative Equity and Asset Allocation teams, as a portfolio manager of several equity and asset allocation portfolios, as Co-Head of International Quantitative Equities, and as CIO of Quantitative Developed Equities. He is a CFA charterholder.

Andrew Spokes is a Partner and the Executive Chair of Farallon. He joined Farallon in 1997 and oversaw the opening of the firm's first international offices in Europe and Asia before serving as Managing Partner of Farallon, a role he held until 2025. Before joining Farallon, he worked in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs for ten years. He graduated with a B.A./M.A. in Chemistry from Oxford University.

Dean Takahashi is Professor Adjunct Emeritus of Management at the Yale School of Management. He is also Executive Director of the Carbon Containment Lab, an independent, non-profit organization that develops and enables innovative solutions to containing greenhouse gases to combat climate change. Launched in February 2024, the Lab is continuing much of the work begun at the Yale Carbon Containment Lab that Dean founded in January 2020.

Prior to his work on climate solutions, Dean served as Senior Director of the Yale Investments Office for more than 3 decades with broad responsibilities for the University’s Endowment and other investment assets. Dean joined the Investments Office in 1986 and over Dean’s tenure, the Yale Endowment was one of the world’s top performing funds. The Endowment grew from $1.5 billion to more than $30 billion, and annual spending from the fund increased from $50 million to $1,400 million.

Together with Yale’s Chief Investment Officer David Swensen, Dean helped develop and pioneer the widely emulated approach to investing often called the Yale Model. Many CIOs of leading universities and foundations started their careers and trained at the Yale Investments Office under David and Dean’s mentorship. Dean taught at Yale for more than 30 years as a Lecturer in Economics and Professor Adjunct at the Yale School of Management. In 2018, he received the Merton J. Peck Prize for distinction and excellence in teaching in the Department of Economics.

Peter serves as Penn’s Chief Investment Officer. Prior to joining Penn in July 2013, he worked at the Yale University Investments Office. At Yale, Peter was also a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management, where he co-taught a class on endowment management. Prior to his time at Yale, Peter worked at the Princeton University Investment Company.

Peter has served on a number of non-profit investment committees, including most recently at The Philadelphia School.

Peter holds an AB in Politics from Princeton

Len Baker has been a partner of Sutter Hill Ventures, Silicon Valley’s oldest venture capital firm, since 1973. He has been an active investor in a number of industries, including entertainment media, semiconductors and semiconductor equipment, biotechnology and medical equipment, and software. He is currently responsible for Sutter Hill’s investments in China.

Len is a former trustee of Yale University, where he chaired the Finance Committee. He served on the Yale Investment Committee from 1990 to 2015. He is a member of the Investment Board of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation. He serves on the board of the Stanford Management Company, the organization that manages the endowment of Stanford University. He is also an advisor to the Packard Foundation Investment Committee and Alta Advisors, a London family office. Len is a board member of the Environmental Defense Fund. He is a former member of the Board of Trustees of Berklee College of Music in Boston and a former board member and chair of the finance and academic committees of Sacred Heart Schools in Atherton, California.

Len earned his BA in mathematics from Yale and his MBA from Stanford.

 

Kim Sargent serves as Chief Investment Officer at the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, a role she has held since January 2018. Prior to joining the Packard Foundation in February 2008, Kim was a consultant with McKinsey & Company’s San Francisco office, and prior to that a senior analyst at the Yale Investments Office. Kim holds an M.B.A. from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and a B.A. from Yale University where she graduated magna cum laude. She is a CFA charter holder and a Finance Leaders Fellow of the Aspen Institute.

Lei Zhang is the Founder and CEO of Hillhouse Capital Management. In 2005, Mr. Zhang founded Hillhouse, an investment platform that partners with visionary entrepreneurs to build businesses and position them for long-term success. Hillhouse works with companies in the technology, healthcare, consumer and business services sectors.

Mr. Zhang is deeply involved in educational endeavors. He earned his M.B.A and M.A. in International Relations from Yale University and is Chair of the Yale Asia Development Council. He is also a member of the Yale Center Beijing Advisory Committee. Before attending Yale, he earned his B.A. in Economics from Renmin University in China, where he is Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees. Mr. Zhang is a founding Trustee and Chairman of the Development Council of Westlake University, China’s first graduate-level university dedicated to advancing research in the basic sciences. Mr. Zhang was also a founding donor of the Westlake University Endowment.