David Swensen, Yale’s Chief Investment Officer, is responsible for more than $18 billion in Endowment assets and several hundreds of millions of dollars of other investment funds. Under his stewardship during the past 21 years the Yale Endowment generated returns of 16.3 percent per annum, a record unequalled among institutional investors. Mr. Swensen leads a staff of 20, 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. In 2004, he won the Inaugural Institutional Investor Award for Excellence in Investment
Management.
Mr. Swensen is a Trustee of TIAA, a Trustee of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, a Trustee of The Brookings Institution, a Trustee of Wesleyan University, a member of the Hopkins Committee of Trustees and a member of the Investment Board of the University of Cambridge. He has advised the Carnegie Corporation, 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. 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.
