Outstanding Achievement Award Recipient
College of Liberal Arts, November 1, 2021
Robert Litterman earned a PhD in economics in 1980 from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. His illustrious career includes serving on the faculty at MIT (1980-82), as a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (1982-86), and at Goldman Sachs (1986-2010) where he headed the Quantitative Resources Group. In 2010, he became a founding partner of Kepos Capital, a New York based globally focused asset management firm, where he also serves as the chairman of the firm’s Risk Committee. At Goldman Sachs, he co-developed the Black-Litterman Global Asset Allocation Model, which made advances in modern portfolio theory accessible to the vast majority of investors. It was developed nearly 30 years ago, and it is still widely used today. More recently, Litterman has become an advocate for environmental policy; dedicating his time, leadership, and expertise to many nonprofit organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Resources for the Future, and Climate Central. He was recently named chair of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Climate-Related Market Risk Committee. He is the recipient of numerous honors from many organizations, including Risk Magazine, the Global Association of Risk Professionals, MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute, and the International Association of Financial Engineers.
Biographies are as-of time of award presentation.