Armen A.A. Avanessians

Armen is the former head and chief investment officer of Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s (GSAM) Quantitative Investment Strategies group. The QIS team manages active equity, smart beta, and alternative risk premia strategies around the world, focusing on factor-based approaches in stock selection, rules-based and customized indices, hedge fund beta, impact investing, as well as tax-efficient investment strategies.

Prior to joining GSAM in 2011, Armen served as head of Strats, a global group responsible for the application of mathematical, quantitative and algorithmic approaches to revenue activities in the Securities, Investment Management and Investment Banking Divisions. He served on the Securities Division Executive Committee since 2003. In over two decades in this role, he was instrumental in developing the teams, practices and platform (SecDb), which collectively drive the commercial application of analytics across most of the firm’s activities today. Armen joined Goldman Sachs in 1985 as a foreign exchange strategist and was named partner in 1994.

Prior to joining the firm, Armen was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill.

Armen is a member of the MIT Investment Management Company (MITIMCo) Board, the MIT Sloan Finance Group Advisory Board, the MIT Corporation Department of Economics Visiting Committee, and the Steering Committee of the Masters in Financial Engineering Program at the University of California, Berkeley. He is co-chair of Columbia Universities Data Science Council, as well as a member of the Columbia Engineering's visitors board and the Columbia World Projects President's Council. He is also a board member of FAR (Fund for Armenian Relief), FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), and the National Museum of Mathematics. Armen is a former trustee of Columbia University and chaired its Audit Committee. He also served as a trustee of the Loyola School.