Dan Shore to step down

Dan Shore, Harvard’s chief financial officer and vice president for finance, will step down this fall, the University announced today.

Shore has been Harvard’s top financial officer since 2008, shepherding the University through the difficult years after the global financial crisis when Schools, centers, and departments had to undertake significant belt-tightening and reassess their financial and programmatic priorities.

Shore will depart in late September to become chief financial officer for Onshape Inc., a startup company involved in computer-aided design.

“The opportunity to be Harvard’s chief financial officer has been a true honor,” said Shore in a statement.  “For me, this is the right opportunity at the right time. But Harvard has had a tremendous impact on me, and I will be forever grateful for the quality and integrity of all my Harvard colleagues, and others throughout the Harvard community, who make this such a unique and remarkable place.”

President Drew Faust thanked Shore for his service and called him an “excellent colleague and leader” with a talent for developing policies and practices to meet financial challenges and for analyzing and explaining complex financial matters.

“Through a time of unusual challenge and change in the economics of higher education, including the 2008-09 global financial crisis and its aftermath, Dan has served Harvard with extraordinary incisiveness and an unrelenting devotion to assuring the University’s long-term financial well-being,” Faust said. “All of us who have had the pleasure to work with Dan will miss him both professionally and personally, and we wish him the very best in all that lies ahead.”

Faust credited Shore with shaping the University’s multiyear financial planning process, helping to launch the Corporation committee on finance, and fostering new approaches to a range of financial challenges, including managing liquidity and debt, funding major initiatives and capital projects, and procuring goods and services.

Harvard Treasurer Paul Finnegan said Shore’s leadership during the financial turmoil was a great help to the University, and the structures he developed will continue to help in the future.

“Harvard benefited enormously from Dan’s steady hand during the financial crisis, and the policies and structures he has put in place will continue to serve the University well,” Finnegan said.

Shore, who has a bachelor’s degree from Duke University, a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.B.A. from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, has been at Harvard since 2003. He served as director of the Office of Budgets and Financial Planning from then until his appointment as CFO and vice president for finance.

Prior to joining Harvard, Shore was a management consultant at McKinsey & Co. and a corporate attorney at Nutter McClennan & Fish.

“As a new graduate of sorts, I will eagerly anticipate hearing about the many ways in which Harvard continues to excel, as it has done across the centuries,” said Shore.  “It has been a privilege to have had the opportunity to participate in a small way in the stewardship and leadership of this wonderful institution.”