Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s $6 billion investment office has unceremoniously fired three of its senior team members, Institutional Investor has learned.
Investment directors Scott Clancy and Anand Desai and investment operations managing director Todd Lusk were laid off on October 11, three sources have confirmed. The three senior staffers were escorted out of the office by security after learning of the unexpected news, according to one of the sources. “It was very inhuman and undignified and disappointing,” another said.
Clancy, Desai, and Lusk did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for CHOA declined to comment.
The layoffs — which have effectively halved the number of senior employees on the CHOA investment team — come roughly four months after new CIO Muthu Muthiah started his role at the healthcare system in June. According to the sources, the staff cuts were the result of team restructuring, rather than performance concerns. As one of the sources noted, it’s not uncommon for a new CIO who has inherited a past leader’s team to make staffing cuts.
The fund had been without an investment chief for about a year: Neil Nag, the prior CIO with three years of tenure, resigned in June 2021. In the interim, CHOA was operated by its relatively deep bench of senior talent.
Institutional Investor previously reported that according to one source, Nag “tried to hire an army to build an in-house team.” During his three years at CHOA, Nag brought in at least eight new employees. This included the three staffers who were let go, each of whom had relocated to Atlanta for their roles.
According to their LinkedIn profiles, Clancy had spent 12 years as a public investments manager at Northwestern University before joining CHOA, while Lusk had been a principal at Rocaton Investment Advisors for seven years prior to coming to the organization. Anand Desai had previously worked as a managing director at Dartmouth’s endowment, fund documents show.
Muthiah, meanwhile, spent three years building Washington-based Group Health Foundation’s first-ever investment office before joining CHOA. The office is called Inanti Investment Management Co., and it manages $2.4 billion in assets.
Muthiah has also worked for Emory University’s endowment, Covariance Capital Management, Spider Management, and the Florida State Board of Administration.
