Nancy Zimmerman

While attending Brown University, Zimmerman spent her summers working for O’Connor & Associates at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. After graduation she spent three years with the firm, trading currency options.^[5] She later managed the interest rate option group for Goldman Sachs.^[4] At Goldman, her boss was Jon Corzine, who later became the Governor of New Jersey.^[5]

Zimmerman co-founded Bracebridge Capital^[6] with Gabriel Sunshine in 1994 with $50 million in seed investment from Farallon Capital and Yale's investment office.^[9] The fund also manages investments for Princeton University.^[5] As of June 2019, it had over $12 billion of assets under management.^[4]

In 2016, Bracebridge and a group of hedge funds successfully contested the debt obligations of Argentina in a New York court of law.^[10] Under the deal negotiated, the hedge funds received about 75% of their judgements with Bracebridge receiving 952% gains, or $1.1 billion on an investment of $120 million.^[3]

Zimmerman's investments in Russia made national headlines in 1997 when USAID ended a $14 million grant to the Harvard Institute for International Development, headed by Zimmerman's husband, after he was accused of using the institute to help Zimmerman with her investments.^[11] As part of a settlement, Zimmerman subsequently paid $1.5 million to the US government through one of her companies, Farallon Fixed Income Associates.^[2] Neither Zimmerman nor her husband admitted wrongdoing.^[5]

Zimmerman is married to Andrei Shleifer, a professor of economics at Harvard University.^[5] She is Jewish.^[12] As of June 2019, she was worth an estimated $740 million and ranked #32 on Forbes 2019 America's Self-Made Women List.^[7]

Zimmerman serves on the board of trustees of her alma mater, Brown University, a position she previously held from 2010 to 2016. She also serves as the Chair of the Carney Institute for Brain Science Advisory Council and is a member of the board of directors of Social Finance. Previously she served on the scholar selection committee of the Institute of International Education's Scholar Rescue Fund.^[13]