Register to attend on the Cornell Ithaca campus or to watch the livestream. This event is free and open to the public.

Event location: Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall G76

The 2026 Hatfield Fellow in Economic Education

Seth A. Klarman ’79 is the chief executive officer (CEO) and portfolio manager of The Baupost Group, L.L.C. He has had primary responsibility for managing the investments of Baupost since the company was formed in May 1982. Baupost uses a value discipline with an event-driven bias to find global opportunities in such diverse areas as publicly traded and private equities, bankrupt and financially distressed debt, and real estate.

Author of Margin of Safety, a book that outlines his value investment philosophy, Mr. Klarman was chosen as editor for Security Analysis: Seventh Edition, published in 2023. He is a 1982 graduate of Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar, and received his Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, in economics from Cornell University in 1979.

Mr. Klarman serves as chair of the board of directors of the Broad Institute. He also serves on Beth Israel Hospital’s board of managers and as a member of their board of trustees. He is a member of the board of dean’s advisors at HBS, where he has been a senior lecturer on value investing and was a 2011 recipient of the school’s Alumni Achievement Award. In 2020, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mr. Klarman is co-chairman of The Klarman Family Foundation.

About the Hatfield Fellows Program

The Continental Group Foundation established the Robert S. Hatfield Fund for Economic Education at Cornell University in 1980 to honor the then retiring chairman, president, and chief executive officer of the Continental Group Inc.

The fund supports the Hatfield Fellows Program, which serves as a major platform for the exchange of ideas between the academic and the corporate communities. The Hatfield Fellows Program is administered by the president of Cornell University, who each year invites one or more distinguished business leaders to meet with students and faculty members and to deliver a major address, the Hatfield Lecture. In 1981, Robert S. Hatfield ’37 inaugurated the Hatfield Fellows Program by serving as the first fellow.