Biography
After receiving his B.A. and B.S. in 1975 from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, Swensen pursued a Ph.D. in economics at Yale, where he wrote his dissertation, A Model for the Valuation of Corporate Bonds.
Prior to joining Yale in 1985, Professor Swensen spent six years on Wall Street as senior vice president at Lehman Brothers, specializing in the firm's swap activities, and as an associate in corporate finance for Salomon Brothers, where his work focused on developing new financial technologies. Swensen engineered the first swap transaction according to When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein.
Swensen is a trustee of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and treasurer of the Hopkins Committee of Trustees. He serves as a trustee of TIAA (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America), and a non-executive director of Schroders PLC. 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 (TIFF), the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and the States of Connecticut and Massachusetts.
At Yale, where he teaches endowment management at Yale College and at the Yale 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. Some Yale alumni have mounted a campaign to name one of two new residential colleges after Swensen.
In February 2009, Swensen was named to a two-year term on President Barack Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Read more about this topic: David F. Swensen
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