Board Of Directors
 
Shawn D. Baldwin - Chairman
Shawn D. Baldwin is Founder, Chairman and CEO of Capital Management Group, LLC (CMG), a boutique investment bank and research advisory firm based Chicago. CMG provides trading, research and investment banking services to pension funds, foundations, endowments and corporations. Since forming in 2002, the firm has participated in over 75 corporate capital markets transactions with a par of over $68 billion in equity and debt financings. The equity capital markets deals include issuers such as the New York Stock Exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Travelers, Genworth Financial and Google, Inc. in which CMG was a Co-Manager.
 
Under Mr. Baldwin’s leadership CMG has also built an extensive network of fiduciaries, academics and market players via its biannual economic conferences. Held in the United States and internationally, the event draws the top plan sponsors and the world’s largest institutional investors to discuss global markets and macroeconomic trends affecting the institutional investor community. CMG’s Economic conferences attendees represent billions of dollars in corporate and government plan sponsors, along with trillions of dollars in global investment managers. Prior to forming CMG, Mr. Baldwin was President and Chief Operating Officer a publicly traded registered investment advisory firm, before this he worked for American Express, US Bank, Optima Investment Management Research, he also held senior positions for several boutique investment banks. Mr. Baldwin is a graduate of Antioch University and has a Master’s in Financial Strategy from the University of Oxford’s Said School of Business. Baldwin completed the Investment Decisions and Behavioral Finance program at Harvard University, the Private Equity and Venture capital program at Harvard Business School and the Wharton Schools Program on Pension Funds and Investment Management. Mr Baldwin is the 2nd African-American member of the Chicago Stock Exchange and holds the series 7, 63 and 24 license designations. Mr. Baldwin is a member of the CFA Institute (formerly AIMR, the Association of Investment Management Research), the Chicago Analysts Society.
 
Mr. Baldwin has been featured in articles in The Economist, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, & Money, he was featured in Investment Dealer’s Digest Top 40 Investment Bankers under 40 and Black Enterprise’s Top 75 Blacks on Wall Street and America’s Most Powerful Players: The Hotlist of Top 40 under 40. Mr. Baldwin was selected as the National Financial Spokesperson for Blackberry and appeared in an ad campaign with a commercial. Baldwin is a financial contributor for Fast Company magazine. Mr. Baldwin has been a speaker on Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, NBC and CBS, he has also been a participant and a speaker at the Money Summit, Milken Global Institute, Fortune’s CEO Strategies Summit, and Forbes CEO Forum.
 
Curt Weldon - Vice Chairman
Congressman Curt Weldon served for 20 years in the United States Congress retiring as both Vice Chair of the House Armed Services Committee as well as Vice Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee. He also served on the Energy Committee of the House Science Committee. Weldon led the 1st US Delegation into Libya to meet with Moammar Gadhaffi, led the 2nd and 3rd US Delegations into Libya with Senator Joe Biden as his guest, again meeting with Gadhaffi, and is the only US Official invited to address the entire Libyan nation in 2004. Weldon also led the 1st two Delegations into North Korea, met with top North Korean Officials and authored the two part 10 Point Peace Plan. Weldon organized over one dozen formal Inter-Parliamentary Relationships with the US Congress and other countries. Weldon’s work in Russia is well documented – he authored the 48 page ‘New Time-New Beginning” Strategy endorsed by over 150 Members of Congress and was the Keynote Speaker at the 100th Anniversary of Kurchatov Institute along with Japanese PM Koizumi and Russian FM Primakov. While in Congress he organized and Co-Chaired the US/FSU Energy Caucus, the Oceans Security Initiative and the International Energy Advisory Council, working with Oil & Gas CEO’s worldwide. Weldon has led over 50 Bi-Partisan Delegations to over 100 nations. He has taught and lectured at Universities around the world including the Technical University of Budapest, Cambridge University (London), Chinese National Defense University (twice), Fudan University, MGMO University (Moscow), Karic University (Belgrade), Al Fateh University (Tripoli) as well as numerous Universities in the US. He has been awarded 5 Honorary Doctorate Degrees and is an Academician/Member of the Russian Federation Academy of Social Sciences. He has received over 100 National and International Awards and Commendations for his public service.
 
Board of Advisers
 
Dr. Tim Jenkinson
 (http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/centres/privateequity/people/Pages/TimJenkinson.aspx) Tim Jenkinson is Professor of Finance at the Saïd Business School, and is Director of Oxford Finance and the Oxford Private Equity Institute. He is a director of various companies including economic consulting firm Oxford Economic Research Associates (Oxera), the leading German utility switching company Verivox Group, and the UK-listed investment fund PSource Structured Debt (LSE: PSD). He has consulted for a large number of companies, regulators, government agencies and industry associations. He is a Professorial Fellow of Keble College, Oxford.
 
Tim joined the Saïd Business School in 2000. He was previously in the economics department at Oxford University, which he joined in 1987, and has also spent periods as a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College. He initially studied economics as an undergraduate at Cambridge University, before going as a Thouron Fellow to the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained a Masters in Economics. He then returned to the UK and obtained a DPhil in Economics from Oxford. 
 
Dr. Chris Geczy
(http://christophergeczy.com/) Dr. Geczy has been on the Finance Faculty at Wharton since 1997 and has recently taken on the Academic Directorship of the Wharton Wealth Management Initiative at Wharton Executive Education. He has a B.A. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in finance and econometrics from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago.
 
He regularly teaches investment management and co-created the first full course on hedge funds at The Wharton School along with a number of executive education courses and has taught AIMR/CFA-Institute-accredited professional Risk Management courses through the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. Before his studies at Chicago, Chris worked for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington, D.C., in its Division of Research and Statistics. Chris is a Fellow of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and has been the New York Stock Exchange Fellow and the Geewax-Terker Fellow at the Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research at Wharton. He has been the Academic Director of a number of Wharton Executive Education programs including the 2009 Securities Industry Institute in partnership with SIFMA, the Investment Management Consultants Association Endowments and Foundations, Alternative Investments and the advanced Investment Strategist Certificate programs. 
 
He has served on the Economic Advisory Board of NASDAQ, acts an editor of the Journal of Alternative Investments and has recently joined the Advisory Board of the Journal of Wealth Management. Chris is also a founding board member of the Mid-Atlantic Hedge Fund Association and was its chairman from 2007 to 2008, and serves on the curriculum and exam committee of the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Association (CAIA).
 
Chris’s current research focuses on various topics including multifactor models, wealth management, risk management, asset allocation, the performance of managed funds, and various aspects of equity lending and short-selling. His work has appeared in numerous books and scholarly journals including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Journal of Political Economy. It has also been covered in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Forbes, NPR, SmartMoney Magazine, on CNBC’s Squawk Box and in numerous other media outlets.
 
Dr. Paul Gompers
(http://www.people.hbs.edu/pgompers/) Paul Gompers, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, specializes in research on financial issues related to start-up, high growth, and newly public companies. Professor Gompers has an appointment in both the Finance and Entrepreneurial Management areas. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in biology from Harvard College in 1987. After spending a year working as a research biochemist for Bayer Chemical AG, he attended Oxford Universityon a Marshall Fellowship where he received an M.Sc. in economics. He completed his Ph.D. in Business Economics at Harvard University in 1993. Professor Gompers spent two years as an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business, the University of Chicago where he created a new course entitled "Entrepreneurial Finance and Management." His course development efforts at the Harvard Business School focuses on issues affecting entrepreneurial firms and their investors.
 
His research focuses on the structure, governance, and performance of private equity funds; sources of financing, incentive design, and performance of private firms; and long-run performance evaluation for newly public companies. His work on private equity funds has examined the relationship between general partners and their portfolio companies.   (Much of his research is collected in The Venture Capital Cycle, forthcoming from MIT Press.)  Gompers has investigated factors affecting the structure, timing, and monitoring activities by the general partner and how these factors affect the success or failure of entrepreneurial firms. Similarly, he has examined the relationship between institutional investors and private equity fund managers. This work has examined a large collection of partnership agreements and examined issues of compensation, covenants and restrictions, as well as distribution policy and performance. Other research efforts examine the institutional and market factors that influence the performance of newly public companies. He is a Faculty Research Fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Corporate Finance Program.
 
Jack Anderson 
(http://appli7.hec.fr/bestin/france/directors.htm) Mr. Anderson is a leading expert on the problem of tax rates and infrastructural issues concerning foreign direct investments and its relationship to human resource management and international business and is a Managing Director, Fairvest ICX. As a partner at Ernst & Young in France he brought more than two hundred firms to France over the past twenty years. He is the cofounder of the Best in France and Best in Ile de France Prizes. A graduate of New York University, Mr. Anderson was awarded diplomas in business (MBA), law (JD) and is a certified public accountant (CPA). He is a frequent contributor to the business press and is the creator of the Tax Misery Index, published regularly by Forbes.