The Cook Children’s Health Care System has hired a senior investor from Columbia University’s endowment as its new chief investment officer, a Cook Children’s spokesperson confirmed Tuesday.
“Tony Bagwell of Columbia Investment Management Company in New York City will join our organization in April as senior vice president, CIO at Cook Children’s,” spokesperson Kim Brown told Institutional Investor in an emailed statement.
Cook Children’s manages about $2 billion in foundation assets for the regional health care network headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas.
Bagwell has spent the last 17 years at Columbia’s endowment, most recently as a managing director, the statement said. His hiring culminates “a months-long nationwide search.”
The fund’s previous chief investment officer, Patrick O’Connor, left last August with deputy CIO Apurva Mehta.
[II Deep Dive: Cook Children’s Health Care Loses CIO & Deputy CIO]
Both joined Mumbai-based asset manager Bay Capital. The firm runs long-only public equities and private equity strategies out of several international offices, but O’Connor and Mehta remain based in the U.S., their LinkedIn profiles show.
Executive recruiting firm David Barrett Partners facilitated the search for Cook Children’s new CIO.
Bagwell is the second senior team member to step down from Columbia’s $11 billion fund in the last few months.
It was announced in November that COO Sanjeev Daga would depart to lead operations at Harvard’s endowment starting this month. Columbia’s longtime former CEO N.P. ‘Narv’ Navekar moved to Harvard in December 2016, becoming the latest in a string of leaders for the nearly $40 billion endowment.
