New Trustee Named

Bruce A. Karsh '77, president of a Los Angeles-based financial management firm, has been elected to Duke's board of trustees, the university's thirty-seven-member governing body. He began serving December 1.

Karsh, who graduated with a degree in economics and earned a law degree at the University of Virginia, is a director of the Duke University Management Company (DUMAC) and vice chair of its board. DUMAC is responsible for managing the university's endowment and other investment assets. He is also president and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, an institutional money-management firm formed in 1995. He had been a managing director of Trust Company of the West and its affiliate, TCW Asset Management Company, and he was the portfolio manager of the TCW Special Credits Funds for seven years.

Before joining TCW, Karsh was assistant to the chairman of Sun Life Insurance Company of America and of SunAmerica, Inc., its parent company. Formerly an attorney with the law firm O'Melveny & Myers, he began his career as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, when Justice Kennedy was a federal circuit-court judge.

Karsh succeeds Lanty L. Smith LL.B. '67 of Greensboro, North Carolina, who resigned as a trustee in June after he was elected to the board of trustees of The Duke Endowment. University trustees are prohibited from serving simultaneously on The Duke Endowment's board.