Senior Fellow
Nicholas Schmitz
Traviesa Chair of Finance and Assistant Professor of Practice
Political Economy

Before joining the Catholic University of America Nick Schmitz spent a decade on Wall Street. He was as Partner and Portfolio Manager in charge of two successful Japanese funds at Verdad Advisers, a quantitative hedge fund. His work involved regular, direct and on-the-ground friendly engagement with his portfolio holdings in Tokyo. Before joining Verdad, Nick worked at Goldman Sachs as an Investment Banker. Nick served as a Captain and Infantry Platoon Commander in the Marine Corps in Afghanistan and taught on the Political Science Faculty at the US Naval Academy. Nick started his professional career when he dropped out of high school to enlist in the United States Marine Corps as a Private when he was 17. He earned a BS from the US Naval Academy, a Master of Philosophy from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  

Nick has published scholarly legal research on the constitutional history of the taxing power, drafted amicus briefs, and testified before Congress on his research. He is the director of the Catholic University of America’s Catholic Investing Initiative. He has published in the Wall Street Journal on faith based investing, and has spoken at the Vatican on the topic. He serves as the inaugural Catholic on the board of the Christian Investing Council, a non-profit ecumenical initiative to improve fiduciary alignment in the faith-based investing industry in the United States. He is a Senior Fellow at the Gibbons Institute for Human Ecology.

  • Investment Valuation and Analysis
  • Quantitative Finance Methods
  • Corporate Engagement and Proxy Voting
  • Financial Startups / Entrepreneurship
  • Originalist Constitutional Law
  • Counterinsurgency
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Nicholas Schmitz