Yale SOM Names Erin Bellissimo First Executive Director of the Swensen Asset Management Institute
The institute aims to build on the legacy of pioneering investment manager David Swensen, who stewarded Yale’s endowment for over three decades.
The Yale School of Management has named Erin Bellissimo, a senior business executive with experience in both higher education leadership and the investment management industry, as the inaugural executive director of the Swensen Asset Management Institute.
The Swensen Asset Management Institute was launched in 2023 and named in honor of David Swensen, who served as the head of the Yale endowment from 1985 to 2021. In all of its activities, the center aims to build on Swensen’s legacy of investment excellence and mentorship, guided by a set of values, scientific rigor, ethics, and purpose.
Kerwin K. Charles, the Indra K. Nooyi Dean and Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Economics, Policy, and Management, welcomed Bellissimo to the school. “The Swensen Institute is an essential contribution to SOM’s mission to educate leaders for business and society,” he said. “Our careful search for its inaugural executive director included many excellent candidates, with a clear first choice of Bellissimo. Her depth of experiences and achievements in investment management and higher education make her extraordinarily well-fitted to this role. I know that I share the sentiment of the faculty who will work closely with her when I say that we could not be more thrilled for her to join SOM.”
Bellissimo’s career has spanned roles in the private sector, higher education, and nonprofit organizations. She has worked in strategic leadership roles at universities, including most recently as the managing director of Notre Dame’s Institute for Global Investing. She also founded the Heilbrunn Center, a value-investing program at Columbia Business School, and serves on the board of the Gabelli Center for Security Analysis at Fordham University. Bellissimo began her career in the private sector as a credit analyst at JP Morgan and later co-founded both a hedge fund and a multi-family office, where she directed business development, marketing, and human capital management. She is also a founding board member of Girls Who Invest, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing the number of women in portfolio management and executive leadership in the asset management industry.
Swensen Symposium: A Celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Pioneering Portfolio Management
September 25, 2025 | 1:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. EDT
Join the Swensen Asset Management Institute for a symposium celebrating David Swensen’s landmark book and exploring the evolving landscape of investment excellence.
“We are thrilled and lucky to have Erin at the helm of the new Swensen Asset Management Institute,” said Tobias J. Moskowitz, the Dean Takahashi ’80 B.A., ’83 M.P.P.M. Professor of Finance and director of the Swensen Asset Management Institute. “Erin’s experience in investment management and higher education is unmatched. Erin shares many of the principles that David Swensen so well espoused and practiced, and which we aim for the institute to foster. I and the rest of the finance faculty are excited to work with Erin to make the Swensen Institute at Yale the pinnacle of finance research and teaching for future generations of asset managers, a goal that would have made David proud.”
Yale SOM has a tradition of producing influential research in all areas of finance and graduates who lead at the highest levels in the profession. Under Bellissimo’s leadership, the Swensen Asset Management Institute will expand its programming and augment research and teaching across the school that relates to asset management, investment performance, and finance. The institute will host its first large-scale event in September 2025: a major conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Swensen’s Pioneering Portfolio Management. Panels will examine the ongoing impact of Swensen’s approach to investing and ask how institutions such as SOM can train the next generation of standout investors.
Bellissimo said she believes the Swensen Asset Management Institute is poised to have meaningful impact on the investment industry. “I am thrilled to be joining the Swensen Asset Management Institute at Yale SOM,” she said. “David Swensen had a tremendous impact on the asset management industry, and I look forward to working with our academic leadership to further David’s legacy through innovative programming and research. We believe that our industry partnerships, approach to experiential learning, and collaborative research will make the Swensen Institute a premier thought leader in investment management.”
