The Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI) at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs is bringing together a community of faculty, fellows, staff, students, alumni, and SIRI supporters who are passionate about sustainable investing and driving systemic change.
Tanvir Ghani is the President and co-founder of Tybourne Capital Management, a multi billion dollar investment management (hedge and private equity) firm based out of Hong Kong. Prior to that Tanvir was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs specializing in alternative assets. He graduated from SIPA in 2001 concentrating in Finance and Business. He lives between London and Hong Kong. Tanvir spends a quality amount of time private equity investing in his home country of Bangladesh.
Steve Lydenberg is Partner, Strategic Vision for Domini Impact Investments LLC, Founder and Chairman of The Investment Integration Project (TIIP), and Founding Director of the Initiative for Responsible Investment. For over four decades he has been active in responsible investment with the Council on Economic Priorities, Trillium Asset Management and KLD Research & Analytics. He is author of numerous articles on responsible investment including, “Reason, Rationality and Fiduciary Duty” and “On Materiality and Sustainability: The Value of Disclosure in the Capital Markets”. He is also author of several books on responsible investment including 21 st Century Investing: Redirecting Financial Strategies to Drive Systems Change (Berrett-Koehler, co-author William Burckart); Corporations and the Public Interest (Berrett-Koehler) and Dilemmas in Responsible Investment (Greenleaf, co-author Céline Louche). He holds a BA from Columbia College and an MFA in Theater from Cornell University and CFA Charter designation.
Mike is global co-head and co-chief investment officer of the External Investing Group (XIG) within Asset and Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs. XIG invests in leading private equity, hedge fund, real estate, credit, public market and ESG managers as a limited partner, secondary-market investor, co-investor or management company partner. Mike also serves on the group's investment committees across private equity, real estate, hedge fund and impact investment strategies. Mike earned a BA in International Affairs from the University of California, Davis, an MBA from Columbia Business School and an MIA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is a CFA charter holder.
Forbes calls long-time institutional investor Jon Lukomnik one of the pioneers of modern corporate governance. The managing partner of Sinclair Capital LLC, a strategic consultancy to institutional investors, Jon has been the investment advisor or a trustee for more than $100 billion (including New York City’s pension funds) and has consulted to institutional investors with aggregate assets of $1 trillion dollars. He served for more than a decade as the executive director of the IRRC Institute and is a former Pembroke Visiting Professor at the Judge Business School at Cambridge. Jon is a member of the Deloitte Audit Quality Advisory Committee, a trustee for the Van Eck mutual funds and serves on the Standards and Emerging Issues Advisory Group of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the Board of The Shareholder Commons and the Advisory Board of The Investment Integration Project. Jon co-founded the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) and Governance Metrics International (now part of MSCI). He is a Senior Fellow for the High Meadows Institute. Jon’s most recent book, “Moving Beyond Modern Portfolio Theory: Investing That Matters” is co-authored with Professor Jim Hawley. Their work focuses on MPT’s inability to deal with systematic risk, and how investors can and do mitigate risks such as climate change, income inequality, lack of diversity, and anti-microbial resistance as a way to increase return and/or reduce risk. Jon is also the co-author of two other books about the capital markets, and more than 200 academic and practitioner papers.
The Managing Director of the Sustainable Investing Research Initiative is Chandana Yelkur. She is an alumna of SIPA’s Master of Public Affairs program in Environmental Science and Policy. Chandana has deep expertise in sustainable investing and reporting. Besides serving as SIRI’s Managing Director, she is also a Research Associate at SIRI and conducts research on systems-aligned metrics.
The Founding Director of the research initiative is Caroline Flammer, Professor of International and Public Affairs and of Climate. She is an expert in sustainable investing and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards. Among other roles, she is the President of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability, a global multi-disciplinary network of scholars fostering rigorous academic research on corporate sustainability. Professor Flammer also serves as the Chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), the largest network of responsible investors to date.