Distinguished Alumni Awards 2026

Ted Huffman, MBA ’96, and his investment colleagues turned their attention to the housing crisis more than 10 years ago, using a multipronged strategy to put homes in neighborhoods where people want to live—with low crime, strong public schools, and easy access to employers. They’re investing capital to jump-start a sector that’s not keeping up with demand.

“We used data that showed new households were forming with nowhere to go, because housing starts had stalled. We thought, ‘Let’s rehabilitate this asset class.’”

He and his colleagues invest in home builders, mortgage lenders and originators, house flippers, and rental homes. Data is key, says Huffman. “We’re putting in $70 billion to the asset class. We’re bringing capital to a sector in need.” 

Huffman’s path to the C-suite zigged and zagged. Born and raised in small-town Blytheville, Arkansas, Huffman grew up surrounded by extended family and in walking distance of the Mississippi River. When he got into Georgetown University’s undergraduate program, “the whole town was cheering for me.” It was Huffman’s first time at a Catholic institution and in an urban setting. “It was like going to Mars,” he says with a laugh.

After Georgetown, Huffman became an officer in the Navy. His father and grandfather had served, and he loved boats. There, too, he was an odd duck: a Southerner in New England. “In the Navy, you’re tested daily,” he says. “I led 35 men when I was 22 years old. I had to understand what made each one of them tick. You can’t pull rank. You have to excel in stressful, challenging situations.”

From there, Huffman applied to Chicago Booth, and only Booth, for an MBA—for its analytic rigor and trailblazing faculty, he says. One class stands out—International Financial Markets and Institutions with Randall S. Kroszner, the Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics. “He taught monetary policy and macroeconomic tools to stimulate growth and prosperity, two goals that inspire me today,” Huffman says.

Following business school, Huffman joined Bear Stearns, where he worked on high-yield bonds and met some of the colleagues he now works with at New York–based Pretium as senior managing director and chief strategy officer. The group at Bear Stearns looked at the asset class of junk bonds and decided to rehabilitate them, rebranding such vehicles as high-yield bonds. “We believed in this as foundational to capitalism. You need capital to fund ideas; to fund entrepreneurs. Capital brings things to life.”

There’s more to Huffman than his success in the business world. During the pandemic, he and his wife, Cheryl, his high-school sweetheart and a corporate securities lawyer, started the nonpartisan GreenShoots Foundation to address vaccine hesitancy. Huffman was behind the “Please Consider Vaccination” ad campaign, a montage of rural life that aired on many television networks. It’s the first of the couple’s efforts with GreenShoots. In addition to advocating for rural healthcare, they also support US military veterans and aim to increase access to affordable shelter.

It’s a full plate for sure. To unwind, Huffman steps out in nature, even if just to take a walk through Central Park, which is right near his office. “I crave the outdoors,” he says. “It settles me and brings me peace.”

Michelle Liem, MBA ’89, considers her global education a key part of her successful career.

Liem is chair and CEO of Nuri Holdings, an investment holding company in Singapore. Her parents started the business, and she and her brother have grown it exponentially.

Their companies now include Giti Tire, which has manufacturing plants in the US, China, and Indonesia and exports to over 100 countries; PT Mitra Adiperkasa, an Indonesian retailer with more than 4,000 stores in Southeast Asia; and Tuan Sing Holdings, a Singapore-listed real estate firm. They also have investments in resources, finance, technology, and healthcare.

“My parents are born entrepreneurs,” Liem says. “They wanted my siblings and me to be well educated so that we could help them grow their businesses.”

From her native Singapore, Liem went to the London School of Economics for her bachelor’s degree and then to Chicago for her MBA. At each place, she says, she learned to adapt. Liem appreciated learning about different cultures and perspectives. She made lifelong friends. These experiences opened her worldview, she says.

In London, Liem enjoyed the camaraderie of fellow students from all over the world. “It was truly global, very diverse.” Classes were large, she notes, but study groups were small, and she excelled. Liem appreciated London’s West End theater district and the city’s magnificent gardens.

In Chicago, she says, she learned about the US market and its culture. “I could better understand how markets work,” she notes. “That helps a lot in business.” Liem was impressed by the quality of her Booth classmates and by the faculty’s wisdom. She’s also grateful to the faculty for their generosity with their time and knowledge. “They really are the best.”

In particular, she remembers the late Roman L. Weil, the V. Duane Rath Professor Emeritus of Accounting. “He made a difficult subject interesting and crystal clear. It made a lasting impression.”

Liem is also impressed with California’s Bay Area, which she visited often while her two children were students at Stanford University. “The whole area is a joy to visit,” she says. “I met so many business leaders, academics, scientists, founders, fund managers, and investors. I admire them for their ingenuity and innovation.”

Except for Singapore, Liem’s favorite place may be Bali, Indonesia, where her family is developing Kura Kura Bali, an eco-island with special-economic-zone status.

But Singapore is home. “It’s a hub: easy for travel and a great place to live and do business. My brother calls it a ‘values-driven’ economy because the people value integrity and honesty. Our prime minister calls that our greatest resource and a competitive advantage.”

The president of Singapore has honored Liem with two national awards: the Public Service Medal, in 2016, and the Public Service Star, in 2025. She serves on the board of SingHealth Fund, the charitable arm of Singapore’s largest public healthcare group. “Singapore is a small country,” she notes. “There’s a kampung [Malay for ‘village’] spirit here. We look out for each other. We help and volunteer.”

Outside of work, Liem spends time with her extended family and supports local jazz musicians. To relax, she plays piano, which she has studied since she was young. She particularly enjoys classical composers such as Chopin and Mozart.

John M. Liew, AB ’89, MBA ’94, PhD ’95, credits the University of Chicago for the good things that have happened to him professionally and personally. First, as a college freshman, he met his future wife, a fellow economics student. He and Serena Liew, LAB ’85, AB ’89, have two sons: One is a graduate of the university; the other is still a student here.

Liew is the child of professors who emigrated from Korea in the 1960s. He was born in Berkeley, California, where his parents met, and grew up near the University of Oklahoma.

Academia was all he knew—and where he saw his future. But now he’s a founding principal at AQR Capital Management in Greenwich, Connecticut. One of the world’s largest and most successful hedge funds, AQR has $240 billion in assets under management.

“My career really started in 1989, when I enrolled in the PhD Program at Booth,” Liew says. “My classmates included Cliff Asness and Bob Krail—two of the founders of AQR. We met in that program, and we built the business on ideas we learned at the University of Chicago.”

Liew and his cofounders caught the “real-world” bug at Goldman Sachs. Asness, a year ahead of Liew at Booth, took a summer internship there. “It was an unusual cohort in that a lot of us went into industry,” says Liew. “In particular, a relatively large group of us went to Goldman Sachs to do quantitative investing. Cliff was the magnet.”

And while AQR is not the model for the Showtime series Billions, which ran from 2016 to 2023 and followed the doings of a Connecticut-based hedge-fund kingpin, Liew says the show resonated with him because of its setting. “A number of the AQR partners’ kids went to Greenwich Country Day School, as did the kids of one of the writers. Scenes in the show were drawn from what we saw at the school and in the community, and that made it fun to watch.”

The hedge-fund business has many players, he says; if you can do one or two things differently, it makes a big difference.

“When we started AQR, it was the early days of quantitative investing—very early—and a lot of what we did was implement the research on factor-based investing that was being done by Gene Fama and Kenneth French.” Liew notes that David Booth, MBA ’71, had come up with a version of this strategy earlier, also with Fama. “The primary difference is that David implemented these strategies in a long-only manner, while we did it long and short,” Liew explains.

He says that another difference between AQR and other hedge funds is the degree of transparency: AQR bucks convention with its willingness to share strategies. “We’re linked with academics—that’s our upbringing—so when we find something new and cool, we like to write about it,” he says. “Most hedge funds are secretive to maintain a competitive edge. But ideas have a way of getting out anyway.”

Cliff Asness, MBA ’91, PhD ’94, is founder, managing principal, and CIO at AQR Capital Management. Eugene F. Fama, MBA ’64, PhD ’64, is the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance and a 2013 Nobel laureate.

As he closes out his more than 50-year career in the chemical industry, James B. Nicholson, MBA ’67, looks back at the bold move his father, Floyd, made at age 60, when he transformed the family business from a distributor to a manufacturer. “It was a major step—a risk,” Nicholson says.

The Detroit-based company, PVS Chemicals, now employs 2,000 people worldwide and has manufacturing plants throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Asia. Nicholson calls it “a maker, distributor, and problem solver.”

PVS has come a long way from its first production output: hydrochloric acid for industrial cleaning. Among other products, it manufactures acids that are used to make computer chips and circuitry—“very, very pure” acids with impurities measured in parts per trillion. “The world changed, and we changed with it.”

Everyday life, Nicholson reminds us, is fueled by chemistry and technology: Acids are in batteries; acids are in cell phones.

Nicholson loves his work. Among its pleasures: His four children hold executive positions within the firm. Three of the four were educated at Booth, so there’s a shared mindset. “We deal in facts, not personality or emotion. It’s so nice to go to dinner with the kids. We talk about business things—whether it’s a good or bad idea to buy a company.” He chuckles. “We never have arguments.”

He holds all his employees close, writing each a personal note on their birthdays.

A graduate of Stanford University with a degree in economics, the young Nicholson continued his education in the Evening MBA Program at Chicago Booth, because he wanted to study with the free-market economist Milton Friedman. “I took a money and banking course with him and learned this: I wasn’t smart enough to become a PhD in economics,” Nicholson says with a laugh. “I knew I’d have to do something else.”

But not before a pit stop in Europe to study for a year at the London School of Economics while working at the First National Bank of Chicago. “That was terrific,” Nicholson recalls. “My wife, Ann, and I traveled to England on the Queen Mary with a steamer trunk and a baby.” After three years in London, he moved to Dublin to open a branch of the bank. His young family was so at home there that his son began to learn Irish Gaelic. “I thought, ‘I could have a career here.’”

Then his father called and asked him to come back to Detroit to run PVS. It was 1972, and the city was experiencing deindustrialization, riots, and white flight.

“I saw the city’s decline. You could buy a house for $600 and a mansion for $6,000.”

Across the street from PVS was a former manufacturing plant. As a defensive move, Nicholson bought the 200,000-square-foot building so that its polished-wood offices wouldn’t languish and thieves wouldn’t strip it of its copper and porcelain. He got it for a song, and the building has served as PVS’s world headquarters ever since.

Nicholson never gave up on Detroit. He became a civic leader, investing in the world-class Detroit Symphony Orchestra and other local institutions, and has been lauded by national and regional organizations for his dedication to the city. “We have a responsibility as individuals to make a difference—to do what’s right,” he says. “I have a bias toward saying yes.”