Tarek Rizk joined Balyasny Asset Management (BAM) in October 2023 as head of the firm’s MENA office, which is based in Dubai. He is leading BAM’s expansion in the Middle East, an area rapidly becoming a global hub for investment talent.
Prior to BAM, Rizk spent over 10 years at Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), in his last position as global head of alternative investments. Backing some of the most successful hedge fund launches of the past decade, he established a culturally diverse team that focused on hedge funds, insurance-linked strategies, and niche private markets, contributing to ADIA’s consistent outperformance. Rizk also enjoyed a successful tenure at Tages Group as partner and head of tactical trading, and at Credit Suisse Asset Management, where he served as cohead of tactical trading with global responsibility for allocating to quant, relative value, and macro hedge funds.
Rizk was an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and at Lawrence Technological University (LTU) in Michigan. At LTU, he was director of the Lear Entrepreneurial Center, which he helped establish in 2002. The center was among the first of its type to teach both engineering and business practices.
Rizk is passionate about education. Throughout his career, he has supported and guided young professionals, including women in the Middle East, empowering them to build self-confidence and excel as leaders in the financial industry. His volunteer work has centered around mentoring and sponsoring groups that are underrepresented in STEM in the both the U.S. and Egypt. Rizk developed “Engineering the World,” a hands-on community outreach program in Detroit, Michigan, designed to teach inner-city schoolchildren about math, science, and the world in which they live. A study of the program, which Rizk coauthored, was named Overall Best Paper by the Civil Engineering Division of the American Society for Engineering Education in 2002.
Born in Egypt, Rizk earned BS and MS degrees in engineering from the American University in Cairo, an MBA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a PhD from the George Washington University, where he was awarded the School of Engineering and Applied Science Scholarship. He completed graduate courses in financial engineering at the University of Michigan and completed the General Management Program offered through Harvard Business School. Rizk is a naturalized U.S. citizen. His wife, Amy Nofal, is a member of the board of education in Mamaroneck, New York. The couple has two sons.
