Amy Falls

Amy C. Falls is Vice President and Chief Investment Officer at Northwestern University, where she oversees an endowment reported at roughly $15.3 billion — one of the largest U.S. university endowments run by a woman, and a role she has held since May 2021 after being named to the post in February 2021. She was the first woman to lead Northwestern's investment office, succeeding William H. McLean, who had run it for 18 years. She is responsible for the returns that fund approximately one-quarter of the university's annual revenue.

Falls spent a decade (2011–2021) as Chief Investment Officer and Vice President for Investments at The Rockefeller University in New York, where she restructured and ran the biomedical research institution's endowment (roughly $2 billion, growing over her tenure). Before that she was the founding Chief Investment Officer of Phillips Academy Andover — the first dedicated investment office at a traditional independent secondary school — where her team posted top-quartile results from 2007 to 2010. Institutional Investor named her a "Rising Star of Foundations and Endowments" in 2010.

Her investing career began on Wall Street: she trained at J.P. Morgan and then Morgan Stanley, where she rose to Managing Director and Global Fixed Income Strategist and served on the firm's Fixed Income Management Committee and Global Asset Allocation Committee. Notably, she came to institutional investing without a finance degree or MBA — she holds a B.A. in History from Georgetown University and a Master of Public Policy in international development and finance from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Falls is also an active fiduciary and board member beyond her CIO role. She has served on the board of Harvard Management Company (which runs Harvard's endowment) and the board of the Ford Foundation, and she is a graduate of Phillips Academy Andover (Class of '82) where she became the first woman president of its board of trustees. She is married to investor Hartley Rogers, with whom she runs the Rogers Falls Foundation, and they have three daughters.

• Concentration over diversification-for-its-own-sake: "I'm a believer in concentrating your portfolio," she has said, directing meaningful capital to highest-conviction managers — while acknowledging that "is obviously a different exercise at $12 billion than at $2 billion."
• Back emerging managers, not crowded winners: On venture, "The key is not necessarily to try to get access to funds that are already heavily invested, because that's almost like a zero sum game." She prefers identifying rising managers and new areas early.
• Thematic tilts: technology that solves real problems (beyond social/communications apps), biotech innovation (leveraging Northwestern's research strengths), and climate/disease solutions; openness to new hedge funds over established "legends."
• Liquidity and optionality (2025 stance): moving cash allocation up to as much as ~7% (from a ≤5% cap) and trimming private equity "at the margin" — "We want the option value of cash, we want the liquidity," citing PE's illiquidity, high fees, and a higher-rate/regulatory environment.
• Team-building as edge: favors collaborative teams mixing generalists and sector specialists, and develops pre-MBA analyst programs (an approach she carried from Rockefeller, where two senior staff started as analysts).