RI People & Appointments, June 16: West Midlands, St. Paul’s Institute, World Resources Institute

Leanne Clements has joined the £9.8bn (€12.3bn) West Midlands Pension Fund as Responsible Investment Officer, a new role. Her main role is to build upon West Midlands’ existing responsible investment approach and create a more active external profile for the Fund in this area. She joins following a similar role at the London Pensions Fund Authority. Separately, the fund is recruiting an Assistant Portfolio Manager, a new role that will focus on its “substantial private equity portfolio”. Earlier this month the fund announced it would provide up to £40m to fund local business initiatives via a partnership with Finance Birmingham, a public-private partnership owned by Birmingham City Council.

Former S&P executive Barbara Ridpath has been named as the new Director of the St. Paul’s Institute, the influential finance, economics and social wellbeing body linked to the London cathedral. A US citizen, Ridpath was Executive Managing Director and Head of Ratings Services, Europe, for Standard & Poor’s from 2004-2008. More recently she was the founding Chief Executive of the International Centre for Financial Regulation, a think tank that was put into administration in 2012. She is a non-executive director of National Australia Group Europe Ltd. and Clydesdale Bank plc.

Paul Murphy has been appointed as Head of Strategy & Business Development, a new role, at the Pensions Trust, the £6bn UK charity sector pension fund. He was most recently Director of Corporate Development at the Peoples Pension.

Jeremy Cote has joined Trillium Asset Management, the US sustainability specialist, as a research analyst. Prior to Trillium, he was a senior investment analyst at FM Global where he was responsible for conducting fundamental research in the consumer discretionary, internet, media and telecom sectors, a position he held since 2004. Link

Robert Tyrer, the former Chief of Staff of the US Department of Defense, has been named as a non-executive director of Clean Air Power, the AIM-listed maker of systems for heavy duty diesel engines. It comes ahead of the company’s launch of its Genesis-EDGE Dual-Fuel product in the US.Pascal Canfin has joined the World Resources Institute (WRI), the research organization, as Senior Advisor for International Climate Affairs in the run-up to the Paris climate talks next year. Canfin joins from the French government, where he served as minister delegate for development under the Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2012, where he sat on the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and was a Vice Chairman of the Special Committee for the Financial, Economic and Social Crisis. Announcement

David Neal has been appointed Managing Director of Australia’s A$100bn (€69bn) Future Fund. He has been Chief Investment Officer of the fund since July 2007 and was previously Head of Investment Consulting with Watson Wyatt Australia. Link

Rhonda Clark has been named Chief Sustainability Officer at logistics giant UPS, taking over from Scott Wicker. Clark was formerly vice president of corporate environmental affairs. Amy Whitley is named the company’s first Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer. She created UPS’s Women’s Leadership Development Program. Announcement

Jonathan Hook has been named by the $2bn Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation as its first Chief Investment Officer. He joins the foundation, one of the largest in the US and which provides around $100m a year in grants to nonprofits that help low-income and vulnerable individuals and families, from the Ohio State University where he was Chief Investment Officer.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation based in Palo Alto, California, is recruiting a Program Fellow, Sustainable Finance, within its Environmental Conservation Program (ECP). The foundation said its sustainable finance effort focuses on reshaping the incentive signals that mainstream financial markets send to companies in order to drive them towards more sustainable use of natural resources. Link