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Vice Chancellor Nathan Brostrom wins a 2009 Bay Area CFO of the Year award

By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations | 01 June 2009

BERKELEY — Nathan Brostrom, the University of California, Berkeley's vice chancellor for administration, has been named Bay Area CFO of the Year for a non-public company.

The fourth annual Bay Area CFO of the Year Awards were issued during a gala dinner and awards ceremony at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on Thursday, May 28.

Nathan Brostrom (Peg Skorpinski photo)

The program is sponsored by the San Francisco Business Times and Larkin Street Youth Services. All event proceeds - which this year totaled $360,000 - go the Larkin Street organization, which provides housing, medical, social and educational services to at-risk homeless and runaway youth ages 12-24 through 25 programs at 13 sites in San Francisco.

There were six award winners altogether. In addition to Brostrom, winners included executives with The Clorox Company, California Water Service Group, BrightSource Energy Inc., the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. and Visa Inc.

"These awards honor the best of the best. These financial leaders exemplify the professionalism, integrity, resilience and mastery of key skills that make a great CFO," said Mary Huss, publisher of the San Francisco Business Times and co-presenter of the awards. "What better cause to invest in - the youth who are the future of our Bay Area community."

As UC Berkeley's chief administrative and financial officer, Brostrom, who took his post in March 2006, manages the campus's annual operating budget and oversees the division that is the largest provider of services to campus staff and a significant provider of services to UC Berkeley students.

"Nathan's innovative ideas are transforming long-range financial planning on campus, but his success also is in the principled way he approaches change, with respect for UC Berkeley's values of access and excellence," said Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. "This is a difficult time for the university system, and we're fortunate to have someone whose leadership not only is recognized by us, but by the Bay Area business community."

"It's rare that one individual can make as many improvements as Nathan has made in their career; let alone the short period of time that he has been at the university," said Stephen Etter, a partner at Greyrock Capital Group in San Francisco, and the person who nominated Brostrom for the award.

"I believe the changes Nathan made in asset management and debt strategies will be utilized not only to the benefit of the students at Berkeley for many years to come, but throughout the entire UC system," said Etter, who also is an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, where he has volunteered his time to teach a course on corporate finance for 28 consecutive semesters.

In his acceptance speech, Brostrom said he was "deeply humbled" by the award and called UC Berkeley is "a remarkable institution, both in the Bay Area and in higher education."

Brostrom added that more than one-third of UC Berkeley's students are Pell Grant recipients, coming from the lowest-income families in California, and that the campus has more Pell Grant recipients than does the entire Ivy League. Nearly one-quarter of UC Berkeley students are the first in their families to attend college, he said.

"Our challenge," Brostrom said in his speech, "is to build a financial model that sustains this commitment to excellence and access today, for the next decade and for the next century."

More information about Larkin Street Youth Services is online at www.larkinstreetyouth.org.