Scott Wilson

Scott L. Wilson has served as Chief Investment Officer of Washington University in St. Louis since 2017, leading the Washington University Investment Management Company (WashU IMC), which manages the university's endowment and Managed Endowment Pool (the long-term asset pool that has grown to roughly $17 billion). He famously made an immediate mark on arrival, redeeming approximately $3.6 billion in assets during his first week and cutting all but one of the endowment's 37 hedge fund relationships as he repositioned the portfolio toward a more concentrated, conviction-driven approach.

Before WashU, Wilson was Chief Investment Officer of Grinnell College — his own alma mater. Earlier in his career he worked on the sell side and in trading: he was Head of Rates Option Trading for Barclays Capital in Japan and held various trading and quantitative roles at Bank of America Securities across Tokyo, Chicago, and London, focused on interest rate, equity, and currency derivatives. He also worked as an equity research analyst (associated with firms including Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse First Boston earlier in his career).

Wilson earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Mathematics, with honors, from Grinnell College, and attended the graduate program in Financial Mathematics at the University of Chicago. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). Under his leadership, WashU's endowment has posted strong long-term results — roughly 9.4% annualized over a recent ten-year stretch (beating the Cambridge Associates median by about 2.2 points), including a record ~65% return year driven substantially by its private and direct positions.

• Don't look like your peers. His central belief: "If you want to beat your index or your peer group, the first thing you have to do is not look like your peer group." He embraces large tracking error versus a passive 70/30 benchmark in pursuit of double-digit returns over 5-, 10-, and 20-year horizons.
• Concentrated, relationship-driven manager selection. Rather than a sprawling roster, he favors deep, mutually-important GP relationships — "we matter to our partners and our partners matter to us" — and seeks managers "building a portfolio that we think is idiosyncratic and orthogonal to anything else we have."
• Direct co-investment alongside GPs. The team deploys capital directly into managers' highest-conviction breakout companies, running independent diligence and moving quickly when conviction aligns.
• Check sizing. Fund commitments typically target around $150 million, with final size often set by capacity constraints rather than internal conviction.
• Sector tilts. Bullish on automation, defense tech, and the healthcare/biotech intersection, plus Asian and South American public equities; skeptical of late-stage crypto valuations and oversized healthcare mega-funds.
• Downturns are opportunities. He views dislocations like the 2020 selloff as optimal windows to deploy capital.