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David F. Swenson has been the Chief Investment Officer at Yale University since 1985 where he is responsible for managing and investing the university's endowment assets and investment funds which total about $16.3 billion. He is responsible for inventing "The Yale Model" which has become an application of Modern Portfolio Theory.

Swensen received a B.A. and a B.S. from the University of Wisconson - River Falls in 1975. He pursued a Ph.D. in Economics at Yale University, writing his dissertation A Model for the Valuation of Corporate Bonds. Prior to joining Yale in 1985, Swensen spent six years on Wall Street as Senior Vice President at Lehman Brothers, and as an associate in corporate finance at Salomon Brothers.

The Yale Model (aka The Endowment Model) is described in Swensen's 2000 book Pioneering Portfolio Management, and was developed by him and Dean Takahashi. The Yale Model consists mainly of dividing a portfolio into five or six roughly somewhat equal parts and investing each in a different asset class. A central part of The Yale Model is broad diversification and equity orientation thus avoiding classes with expected low mutual fund returns such as commodities and fixed income. This type of investing where stress is put on allocating only a small amount of tradition U.S. equities and bonds and more to alternative investments, is being followed by many large endowments and foundations and is therefore also known as The Endowment Model or The Endowment Model of Investing.

Swensen is also popular for his book Unconventional Success which came out in 2005 and is targeted toward the individual investor.  From a guest lecture: "We spent all this time in Intro Econ learning how there's no free lunch, but Markenwoods tells us that diversification is a free lunch. For any given level of return you can reduce the risk; for any given level of risk you can increase the return."