Until Feb. 1, 2023, we were Group Health Foundation. This post was written under our former identity. To learn more about our new name, read our announcement here.
Peng visits Tiananmen Square on a business trip to Beijing.
Peng joins Group Health Foundation as the managing director of investments. He’s eager to apply his 15+ years of investing experience to generate financial returns that support the Foundation’s mission. Peng says, “I believe Group Health Foundation’s purpose of improving health and racial equity is fundamentally important.”
He feels fortunate to have gotten his start in asset allocation and risk management through an internship in the investment office of Georgetown University, where he obtained his master’s in physics. Peng emigrated from Beijing, China, after earning his bachelor’s in physics and economics at Peking University.
Peng says he’s always had a passion for financial modeling. He explains how physics and finance have a lot in common: “Through modeling and statistical analysis, one’s able to compute the odds for how a financial system might behave—estimating risks and making portfolio decisions to manage around those risks.”
After interning at Georgetown, Peng was promoted to an analyst in the investment office, where he managed commodity, fixed income, and equity portfolios, as well as designed dashboards to monitor risk and performance. From there, Peng went on to work as a risk manager at the $7.5 billion University of Virginia Investment Company. Most recently, he was the head of portfolio research for TIAA Endowments, where he developed the Enterprise Approach to Endowment Management (EAEM) to quantify risk tolerance and the Capital Market Assumption (CMA) to help with manager selection.
Outside of work, Peng loves being outdoors—hiking, fishing, hunting, and taking pictures. He’s explored many of our country’s national parks, including Glacier in Montana and Shenandoah in Virginia, which are some of his favorites. His photography of parks has also been featured in Lonely Planet travel guides. Peng is moving from Houston to Seattle, and is looking forward to visiting many of our Northwest’s national parks. His family—spouse and almost two-year-old daughter—will follow a few months after he gets settled.