Most of the new Goldman Sachs partners announced yesterday have been with the bank for the majority of their career. Most have demonstrated the necessary loyalty to make the senior ranks and have never moved out of finance. There are, however, exceptions. Some of Goldman’s brand new partners have digressed and been busy with the sorts of activities unequivocally judged as making the world a better place.
Take Jonathan Barry, a managing director in Goldman Sachs’ U.S. operation. He left Goldman Sachs in 2013 after nearly 13 years. He went on to become a partner at the Cancer Therapeutics Innovation Group (CTIG) in San Francisco. This firm sequences the DNA of cancer tumours to give doctors more insight into the specific mutations of an individual case and, therefore, more information on how to make the right treatment decisions.
Barry left Goldman Sachs two years after being named a managing director in 2011. However, he spent just 10 months at CTIG before returning to the bank in March 2014.
Then, there’s Parameswaran Gopikrishnan. Before joining Goldman he was a physicist at Boston University and spent some time researching random-matrix theory, which is used in finance to find hidden correlations in masses of data. Gopikrishnan studied its affects on the stock markets to filter out millions of ‘random’ seemingly similar movements in the stock market to find genuine patterns.
In 2011 Gopikrishnan’s research – which was conducted with Boston University professor H. Eugene Stanley – was used by MIT chemistry and chemical engineering professor Arup Chakraborty to identify patterns in mutations of the HIV virus. At the time, it was described as “promising”.
Most other partners have spent their entire careers working in finance. However, not all of those bumped-up have been at Goldman Sachs for years. Peter Hermann, head of the European pension and insurance strategies group, joined from Royal Bank of Scotland in 2009 and was made managing director in 2012. Kathleen Hughes, global head of liquidity solutions sales at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, came from J.P. Morgan in 2010 and Dimitrios Nikolakopoulos, head of global equity structured products trading, joined as a managing director 2013. You don’t have to work at Goldman forever to make partner.
Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com
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