Sir James D. Wolfensohn is Chairman of Wolfensohn & Company, LLC. He was President of the World Bank Group from 1995 to 2005 and thereafter served for one year as Special Envoy for Gaza disengagement for the Middle East Quartet.

Sir James had a long and successful career in his own investment and advisory firm, and held leadership positions at firms in leading financial centres, including as Group Chief Executive of Schroders London and an Executive Committee member of Salomon Brothers.

He is Chairman Emeritus of the Boards of Trustees of Carnegie Hall, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Bretton Woods Committee. He has served many other commercial and eleemosynary boards, including as Chairman of the Citigroup International Advisory Board, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis.

Sir James is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences as well as a Member of the American Philosophical Society. He has a knighthood of the Order of the British Empire (KBE), the Grand Cordon of the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun, the Commander’s Cross of the German Order of Merit, and the award of Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).
 
He holds a BA and LL.B from the University of Sydney and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business. Sir James and his wife, Elaine, have three children.