Vice Chair of the Board
Russell Read, PhD
Vice Chair of the Board, The WaterRising Institute & The WaterHouse. Founder of the C Change Group.
Vice Chair of the Board
Vice Chair of the Board, The WaterRising Institute & The WaterHouse. Founder of the C Change Group.
“Water is the resource on which every other resource depends. Building the transformative, sustainable infrastructure it requires, and the investment models that fund it, is among the defining opportunities of our era.”
About Russell Read
Russell Read, PhD, serves as Vice Chair of the Board of The WaterRising Institute and its global platform, The WaterHouse. He is the founder of the C Change Group, a firm dedicated to materially improving the world's utilization of natural resources by developing transformative and sustainable infrastructure and related private-equity investment opportunities.
An institutional investor for more than 40 years, Russell has served as Chief Investment Officer for the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APFC), the Gulf Investment Corporation in Kuwait, and the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS).
During his tenure at APFC, the Permanent Fund achieved top-six-percentile investment returns among U.S. public funds, as measured by Callan, while helping to transform it from a sovereign wealth fund into a sovereign endowment fund capable of sustainably funding roughly one-third of the State of Alaska's operating needs. APFC was named Top Private Equity Institutional Investor for 2017 by PEI Magazine during his tenure.
Russell also served as Chairman of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets under Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. He was named one of America's 30 most influential players in business and finance by SmartMoney, and identified as number 35 on Institutional Investor's list of the 75 most effective chief executives.
He received his undergraduate degree in Statistics and his MBA in Finance and International Business from the University of Chicago, and his master's in Economics and doctorate in Political Economy from Stanford University.
His doctoral work, The Politics and Policies of National Economic Growth, focused on the economic roles of natural resources in economic development. He has taught graduate-level courses at the University of California, Davis, where he served as a visiting Associate Professor and Executive-in-Residence, as well as at the University of Maine and Stanford University, and he has been a guest lecturer at Columbia University, New York University, Tufts University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
More than four decades as a Chief Investment Officer, across the Alaska Permanent Fund, the Gulf Investment Corporation, and CalPERS.
Founder of the C Change Group, developing transformative, sustainable infrastructure and related private-equity opportunities.
Former Chairman of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, and a scholar of the economics of natural resources.
For board, media, or partnership inquiries, reach The WaterRising Institute team.
