Since 2016, Ken Hersh has served as President and CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center which houses the George W. Bush Library and Museum and the George W. Bush Institute.

In 1988, he co-founded NGP Energy Capital Management, one of the nation’s largest natural resources private equity firms. Until 2016, he served as CEO of the firm, investing over $12 billion, earning a 27- year 30% annualized rate of return, making it one of the nation’s leading private investors.

Additionally, Ken manages his family investment office that invests across numerous industries. He sits on numerous corporate and not for-profit boards, including the Texas Rangers Baseball Club. He sits on the Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution, the Deans Council of the Harvard Kennedy School and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

He is an active philanthropist through the efforts of The Hersh Foundation both in his community and around the country. In 2023, his book, The Fastest Tortoise: Winning in Industries I Knew Nothing About, was released which chronicles lessons evolving from his business and personal experiences.

Dave Morehead joined the Baylor University Office of Investments in 2011 and currently serves as the Chief Investment Officer. Previously, he was a senior portfolio manager at Lotsoff Capital Management, where he managed securities across the corporate capital structure, and a partner at Highview Capital Management, where he focused on public and private energy investments. Prior to this, he was a portfolio manager at Ritchie Capital Management, responsible for a generalist corporate relative value and distressed portfolio and spent time performing equity research on the transportation/logistics and specialty retail sectors at William Blair & Company. Mr. Morehead also held roles at Bank of America, where he was responsible for the risk management of the bank's interest rate derivatives desk, and First Trust Advisors, where he advised community banks on their investment portfolios. Dave graduated summa cum laude from Wheaton College and earned his MBA in finance and entrepreneurship with honors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He also holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.

Yung-Yu Ma is the Chief Investment Officer for BMO Wealth Management in the U.S. and joined the organization in 2016. As Chief Investment Strategist, he is responsible for guiding strategic and tactical asset allocations for client portfolios and leads a team that conducts macroeconomic and market analysis, and also modeling across asset classes.

Yung-Yu is frequently cited in print media including the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Barron’s, the Financial Times, etc., and has regular television appearances on CNBC, CNBC Asia, and Yahoo Finance TV.

Prior to joining BMO, Yung-Yu was a finance professor at Lehigh University, where he taught courses in equities, fixed income, and derivatives. His academic studies have been cited in leading finance journals (including the Journal of Finance), top law journals, the Wall Street Journal, the Handbook of High Frequency Trading, and in the Oxford Handbook of Corporate Governance. 

Kirk Sims heads TRS’ Emerging Manager Program. Since being established in 2005, TRS has committed $3.7 billion to one of the largest programs of its kind. An additional $2 billion has been invested directly with EM Program graduates. Each graduate was selected as a result of consistent outperformance among a group of more than 160 EM managers. Recognizing the Program’s success, in early 2019, TRS rolled out a plan to invest another $3 billion over the next three to five years.

Sims joined the Teacher Retirement System of Texas on March 1, 2019. Before joining Texas Teachers, he was a Senior Investment Officer for the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois. Sims had oversight and management responsibility of TRS’s Emerging Manager Program, a $750 million evergreen pool of capital designed to identify and invest in emerging investment managers across all asset classes.

Prior, Sims worked at Prudential Retirement where he was responsible for a manager of manager’s retirement platform as well as an open architecture investment platform. He also has a background in asset management and has held various positions with both large and small asset managers.

Sims is a CFA charter holder and holds a Masters in Business Administration from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He received a Bachelor of Business Administration from Howard University in Washington, DC.

Mr. Heer is a Managing Director at the University of Illinois Foundation. In his role he advances learning, research, and engagement activities within the Investment Office, leading and supporting the Foundation’s thesis-driven and outbound sourcing efforts. Jeremy has previously held investment management roles at the University of Chicago, Singer Partners, UBS, and Morgan Stanley, as well as other financial industry roles at Morgan Stanley and Cargill. Jeremy earned an MBA from New York University and a BS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.