David Swensen

David Swensen, Yale’s Chief Investment Officer, is responsible for $16 billion in Endowment assets and several hundreds of millions of dollars of other investment funds.  Under his stewardship during the past 24 years the Yale Endowment generated returns of 14.2 percent per annum, a record unequalled among institutional investors.  Mr. Swensen leads a staff of 24, located near the University’s campus in downtown New Haven.

Prior to joining Yale in 1985, Mr. Swensen spent six years on Wall Street – three years at Lehman Brothers and three years at Salomon Brothers – where his work focused on developing new financial technologies.  At Salomon Brothers, he structured the first swap, a currency transaction involving IBM and the World Bank.  Mr. Swensen authored Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment and Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment, both published by The Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. 

Among Mr. Swensen’s awards, in 2004, he won the Inaugural Institutional Investor Award for Excellence in Investment Management, in 2007, he received the Mory’s Cup for conspicuous service at Yale, and in 2008, he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.  At Yale, where he teaches students in Yale College and at the School of Management, he is a Fellow of Berkeley College, an Incorporator of the Elizabethan Club, and a Fellow of the International Center for Finance.

Mr. Swensen is a Trustee of TIAA and a Trustee of The Brookings Institution.  He has advised Cambridge University, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Carnegie Corporation, the Hopkins School, the New York Stock Exchange, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Yale New Haven Hospital, the Investment Fund for Foundations, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and the States of Connecticut and Massachusetts.