Michael Stohler

Michael Stohler is a physicist-turned-institutional-investor who currently serves as Chief Investment Officer of the Wisconsin Investment Management Company (WISIMCO), the investment subsidiary of the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association (WFAA). He assumed the CIO role in 2021 (start date September 7, 2021) and oversees roughly $6 billion in assets, about $5 billion of which is University of Wisconsin–Madison endowment capital invested across every asset class. A Racine, Wisconsin native, he returned to his home state for the role.

Immediately prior, from June 2015 to 2021, Stohler was Managing Director of Investments (initially titled Managing Director of Asset Allocation) at the Washington University Investment Management Company (WUIMC) in St. Louis — the source of the `[hidden]` email address. There he helped steer a multi-billion-dollar endowment (about $7.3 billion at the time he joined), developing asset positioning, risk management, and research strategy, and investing capital across all asset classes.

Before entering endowment management, Stohler spent roughly a decade at J.P. Morgan's Asset Management / Private Bank group. His roles there included Managing Director and International Head of Portfolio Construction (based in London), Chief Risk Officer of the alternative investments platform, and Vice President on the alternative investments team.

Stohler's path into finance was unusual: he began his career as a high school physics teacher in Indiana before earning a PhD in physics from Purdue University (2002). He holds a BA in physics, magna cum laude, from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota (1996), a master's degree from Indiana University, and an MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business (2004). This quantitative background underpins his emphasis on portfolio construction and risk management.

• Long-horizon, discipline-over-timing allocator. He runs a strategic, endowment-model portfolio and rebalances mechanically rather than chasing trends: *"We're in the normal zone, and when you're in the normal zone you just stick to your strategic plan."* (UW Now livestream, Dec 2025)
• Rebalancing as the edge. He has described disciplined rebalancing to long-term targets as *"like watching paint dry, but it's actually aligned with the best outcomes"* — deliberately avoiding reactive moves based on daily volatility or hot sectors (e.g., not over-chasing technology).
• Multi-asset, all-asset-class mandate. Public equities, private equity/venture (as a limited partner), real assets, fixed income, and alternatives — allocating primarily to external managers rather than making direct company investments.
• Manager selection and portfolio construction driven. His stated strength (echoed by former WUIMC CIO Kimberly Walker) is "portfolio construction, risk management and quantitative skillsets" — selecting and sizing manager relationships to shape the endowment's risk/return profile.
• Stated purpose: *"My goal is to ensure that donor gifts supporting many UW–Madison programs are managed in a way that balances the best risk-and-return trade-off."*