Scott Pittman

Scott Pittman
Mount Sinai Medical Center

In 2008 the board of Mount Sinai Medical Center Foundation decided it was ready to take its $1 billion portfolio to the next level and hire a full-time chief investment officer. They reached out to Scott Pittman. It could hardly have been a better fit. Pittman, 35, a onetime premed who has an MBA in finance from Baylor University, was helping manage the Waco, Texas, school’s endowment, alongside CIO Jonathan Hook. In the five years they worked together, the two completely modernized the $1 billion Baylor portfolio.

Then, not long after Hook left for Ohio State University in August 2008, Pittman followed him out the door to Mount Sinai in New York. Since joining in January 2009, he has applied the same investment approach he used at Baylor to the Mount Sinai portfolio. Today more than 70 percent of its assets are invested in hedge funds across various strategies. Pittman is as focused on risk management as he is on absolute return. One of his early moves was to size holdings so that no one manager has too much or too little impact. Pittman is beating his benchmark, the MSCI world index, and doing so with much less risk.