quantitative investment strategies. He is also a member of the GQE Investment Policy Committee. Prior to joining GSAM, he was a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alford has also served as an academic fellow in the Office of Economic Analysis at the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C. He has written articles published in the Journal of Corporate Finance, the Journal of Accounting Research, the Journal of Accounting & Economics, and the Accounting Review. Alford has a B.S. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine (1984) and MBA and Ph.D. degrees from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago (1986 and 1990). Ripsy Bandourian, Analyst, has been part of the Global Investment Strategies group since its inception in December 2001. She joined Goldman Sachs as an analyst with the Institutional Client Research & Strategy group in July 2001. She assists the team's Research Strategists in advising our clients worldwide as well as participates in research on today's investment issues. She graduated Phi Kappa Phi and cum laude with a B.A. in Economics and Molecular Biology and M.S. in Statistics from Brigham Young University. Jonathan Beinner, Managing Director, is a portfolio manager and the Chief Investment Officer responsible for overseeing fixed income portfolios, including government, mortgage-backed, asset-backed, corporate, nondollar, and currency assets. Prior to being named CIO, Beinner was co-head of the U.S. Fixed Income team. He joined Goldman Sachs Asset Management in 1990 after working in the trading and arbitrage group of Franklin Savings Association. He received two B.S. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. David Ben-Ur, Vice President, is a Senior Investment Strategist in the Global Manager Strategies group. He is responsible for identifying, evaluating, selecting, and monitoring external managers for all U.S. equity products. Ben-Ur joined Goldman Sachs in January 2000. Previously, he was a Senior Fund Analyst and Assistant Portfolio Strategist at Fidelity Investments in Boston, where he worked for five years. Ben-Ur received his B.A., magna cum laude, in 1992 from Tufts University, where he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa National Honor Society. He received his Master's in Public Policy from Harvard University's John F Kennedy School of Government, with a concentration in International Trade and Finance, in 1995. Mark M. Carhart, Managing Director, joined GSAM in September 1997 as a member of the Quantitative Strategies team and became co-head of the department in