PASADENA, Calif. - California Institute of Technology president David Baltimore has announced the election of Lewis van Amerongen to the Institute's Board of Trustees.
An investment banker, van Amerongen has spent roughly 35 years in the management buyout and merchant banking business. He has been a private investor since 1994, and was a general partner of Gibbons, Green, Goodwin, and van Amerongen from 1970 to 1994.
His private investments include Lost Creek Land & Cattle, an 18,000-acre agricultural and cattle ranch located about 20 miles from the Denver, Colorado, International Airport, and Erickson Air-Crane Inc. Erickson owns the type certificate for, and is the manufacturer of, the S-64 helicopter. Erickson also operates the largest fleet of S-64's in the world, providing services for logging, aerial construction, and firefighting in North America, Europe, Korea, Malaysia and Australia. Formerly the chairman and CEO, van Amerongen is currently chairman emeritus.
Van Amerongen holds a BSE degree from Princeton, and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford. While in school, he was both an all-American soccer player, and an all-Ivy lacrosse player.
Founded in 1891, Caltech is located on a 124-acre campus in Pasadena. The Institute also manages the nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory and operates eight other off-campus astronomical, seismological, and marine biology facilities. Caltech has an enrollment of some 2,000 students, more than half of whom are in graduate studies, and a faculty of about 280 professorial members and 65 research members, and some 560 postdoctoral scholars. Caltech employs a staff of more than 2,600 on campus and 5,100 at JPL.
