Two Trustees Named to Columbia’s Board

The Trustees of Columbia University have named two new members to the Board—Armen A. Avanessians, SEAS ’83, and A’Leila Bundles, Journalism ’76.

Bundles and Avanessians join the board in a period of major change, as the University undertakes its largest expansion effort in more than a century as well as a $4-billion capital campaign.

Avanessians is a big contributor to the University’s fund-raising effort. A director of FICC Strategies, Equity Strategies, Investment Banking and Financing Group Strategies, and GSAM Strategies at Goldman, Sachs & Co., he has contributed $5 million to the campaign and previously sat on the board of the Columbia Alumni Association.

Avanessians began studying at Columbia started in high school when, during his senior year, he took classes at the School of General Studies. After receiving his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from MIT, he enrolled for a master’s degree at SEAS. 

“Usually, most graduate programs are quite narrow, but at Columbia I was able to take a broad range of classes,” Avanessians said. “I am excited and humbled at the opportunity to be a trustee, to give something back to Columbia for everything it’s done for me.”

Upon graduation, Avanessians worked at Bell Labs before joining Goldman Sachs. Today he is in charge of the firm’s analytic group and oversees roughly 700 engineers, mathematicians, scientists, and computer scientists.

Bundles, a journalist and author, first developed a passion for reporting while in junior high school. According to Bundles, she happened to have been part of the wave of people who graduated from the School of Journalism in the mid-1970s, just a few years after the Washington Post’s reporting on the Watergate scandal attracted a lot of attention to the profession.

Speaking about her time as a student at Columbia, Bundles said: “On a personal level, the year was very challenging for me because my mother died during the Christmas holidays. But I made several friends that year and remain in contact with many of them.”

Bundles said she was most influenced by Phyllis Garland, her master’s paper adviser, and former CBS broadcaster Fred Friendly, with whom she took two courses.

“I already knew how to write news stories when I arrived at Columbia, but there is no substitute for the network one develops through the faculty and through classmates, many of whom occupy important positions in journalism,” she said. “Columbia opened many doors.”

Over the years, she has worked at NBC News and ABC News as a producer and an executive.

The most important thing she learned in her time at Columbia? “Phyllis Garland’s advice that I write my master’s paper about my great-great-grandmother, Madam C. J. Walker, led me to write her biography, which was published by Scribner a few years ago,” Bundles said. “I’m currently writing a sequel to that book.”

Commenting on her recent appointment to the Board of Trustees, Bundles said, “I was delighted to accept the invitation ... because serving on the board provides an opportunity to help shape the future of the institution at a particularly exciting time of development, of expansion and of renewed commitment to alumni in the Bollinger administration.”

Monica Varman can be reached at news@columbiaspectator.com.