Jason MacDonald was named investment director at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., overseeing its $1 billion endowment, said E.J. Miranda, a university spokesman.
A Rutgers alumnus, Mr. MacDonald will join the university July 20.
Mr. MacDonald will be the university’s first investment director for the endowment, “responsible for the day-to-day oversight,” Mr. Miranda wrote in an e-mail.
Previously, “Rutgers worked with a general investment consultant that assisted the university’s investment committee and finance staff with managing the portfolio,” Mr. Miranda wrote. Mercer has been the consultant and is being retained, he added.
Mr. MacDonald is senior portfolio manager for private markets for the New Jersey Division of Investment, a unit of the state Treasury Department that manages investments for the $70.9 billion New Jersey Pension Fund, Trenton.
“Jason has been instrumental in building the alternative investment portfolio, and his contributions to the division and the state are too numerous to list,” Joseph Perone, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, wrote in an e-mail. “Suffice it to say, he will be greatly missed.”
Mr. Perone said Christopher McDonough, the division’s director and chief investment officer for the New Jersey Pension Fund, “will be working with Jason and the team to develop a plan to ensure the alternatives (investments) program continues to be managed in a thorough and robust fashion — as it has been under Jason’s leadership.”
