Dr. Ashby H.B. Monk is the Vice Chairman of Philip Equities, where he works across the firm's institutional research program, technology initiatives, and governance standards.
Dr. Monk is the Executive and Research Director of the Stanford Research Initiative on Long-Term Investing and a Senior Research Engineer at Stanford University's School of Engineering. He previously spent a decade as Executive and Research Director of the Stanford Global Projects Center. His work focuses on the governance, design and long-term performance of institutional investors, particularly sovereign wealth funds and public pension funds. He has more than 20 years of experience studying and advising governments and asset owners, including as Senior Advisor to Danantara Indonesia, Indonesia's sovereign wealth fund, and as Senior Advisor to the Chief Investment Officer of the University of California from 2014 to 2016. He was named by CIO Magazine as one of the most influential academics in the institutional investing world.
Dr. Monk is the author or co-author of seven books, including The Technologized Investor (Stanford University Press, 2020), which received a Silver Medal at the 2021 Axiom Business Book Awards; Sovereign Wealth Funds: Legitimacy, Governance, and Global Power (Princeton University Press, 2013); and Reframing Finance: New Models of Long-Term Investment Management (Stanford University Press, 2017). The Technologized Investor was described by Eric Schmidt, former Chief Executive Officer of Google, as a detailed road map for pension funds seeking to harness technology and invest for the long term. He has published over 180 research papers, his academic work has been cited approximately 3,500 times, and his research and commentary have appeared in The Economist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Institutional Investor, Reuters, Forbes and on NPR, among others.
Outside the university, Dr. Monk is co-founder and Managing Partner of KDX, a venture firm focused on investment technology. He has co-founded several companies applying advanced analytics to capital allocation, including RCI Navigator, acquired by Addepar, where he subsequently served as Head of Research from 2021 to 2023; FutureProof; NetPurpose; D.A.T.A.; GrowthsphereAI; SheltonAI; and Long Game Savings, acquired by Truist.
Dr. Monk is a member of the CFA Institute's Future of Finance Advisory Council and an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Oxford. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Princeton University, a Master's in International Economics from the Université de Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a PhD in Economic Geography from the University of Oxford, where he was a member of Christ Church.