Kim Lew

Columbia Investment Management

When Kim Lew arrived at the Columbia University endowment, she was very transparent with the Board. At their first meeting she said, “here’s my background, these are the things that are important to me — we’re going to have more diversity in the portfolio.” Lew was born and raised in New York City, spending her early years in Harlem and then moving to the Bronx when she was school-aged. She is a proud product of the New York City School system, having attended PS 154, PS 9, Mosholu Parkway Junior High School, and the Bronx High School of Science. Lew believed that by highlighting how the endowment portfolio could mirror Columbia’s mission and values her strategy would resonate with the board, thereby connecting her approach to university’s positions on diversity within its classes, faculty and administration. As President and Chief Executive Officer of the Columbia Investment Management Company, Lew is responsible for managing the University’s endowment. She is the first African American and Chinese American woman to run a large Ivy League endowment. She came to Columbia from Carnegie Corporation of New York, where she worked for more than a decade, most recently as Vice President and Chief Investment Officer. Under Lew’s leadership, Columbia’s investment management company is making changes to how it approaches diversity through a series of steps, including crafting a diversity policy statement, building the diversity policy statement into its processes, and conducting bias training. Lew began her career at Chemical Bank as a credit analyst, after receiving her BS in economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She went on to graduate with an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1992, after which she joined Prudential Capital Group and then the Ford Foundation, where she spent more than a decade, first as a portfolio strategist investing in the technology sector and then as a senior manager responsible for the organization’s private equity investments.