$25 million from Michael and Robin Psaros deepens a center where Wall Street meets Washington

Michael G. Psaros likes to describe his most important gifts as a repaid debt, not as charity.

Georgetown University just announced that Psaros, a 1989 graduate of the McDonough School of Business, his wife, Robin, and their family have raised their total commitment to the Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy to $25 million.

The total combines the $11 million endowment gift the family made in 2022, when the center took the Psaros name, with a new $14 million gift tied to Called to Be, Georgetown’s university-wide campaign.

“My family’s gift to the Psaros Center is an act of patriotism, not an act of philanthropy,” Psaros said in the announcement. “It is our way of giving back to our country.”

It is an unusual way for a donor to talk about his own giving, but it fits a man who has spent more than three decades buying and rebuilding industrial companies and who sees the rules that govern markets as a public good.

“The financial markets touch every aspect of American life,” he said.

“Financial policy, from legislation to regulation, has an outsized influence on our financial markets and our economy. The Psaros Center serves the national interest by helping ensure that financial policy is informed by rigorous research, practical experience, and bipartisan dialogue.”

The news came just before the center’s Financial Markets Quality Conference on September 23, one of its main yearly gatherings of regulators, market participants and scholars.

According to Georgetown, the expanded commitment is meant to extend the center’s national and global reach, support rigorous nonpartisan research and bring together leading voices from Wall Street, government, and academia.

“We are where Wall Street meets Washington,” Psaros said, “and I am proud that the Psaros Center is recognized as one of the few truly nonpartisan institutions in Washington respected by both sides of the aisle.”

His connection to the center goes back to its beginning. Reena Aggarwal, the Robert E. McDonough Professor of Finance, founded it after the 2008 financial crisis. She wanted a place at Georgetown where policymakers and financial leaders could meet over objective, data-driven research rather than talk past one another.

Psaros provided seed funding then to help make her idea real. Fourteen years later, his family endowed and named the center. It now enters a new phase under executive director Michael Piwowar, who earned his MBA at Georgetown in 1994 and previously served as acting chairman and commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Its distinguished fellows include former CFTC chairman Rostin Behnam, former Federal Reserve vice chair and National Economic Council director Lael Brainard, and former House Financial Services Committee chair Patrick McHenry.

Psaros’s career explains why he cares about the space between markets and policy. After working as an investment banker at Bear, Stearns & Co., he joined the predecessor of KPS Capital Partners in 1991 and co-founded KPS in 1997. The firm became one of the best-known private equity investors in manufacturing and industry.

It often buys businesses that large corporations want to sell, family-owned companies, or companies going through financial restructuring and turns them into independent enterprises.

KPS funds manage about $19.1 billion in assets, and their portfolio companies employ roughly 62,000 people in 277 manufacturing plants across 25 countries. Psaros chairs or sits on the boards of companies including AM General, Briggs & Stratton, Innomotics, and Princess Yachts.

Georgetown has been central to his giving.

In 2013, he and Robin created the Michael and Robin Psaros Endowed Chair in Business Administration at McDonough. In 2021, the family endowed the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew Endowed Orthodox Chaplaincy at Georgetown, a lasting spiritual home for Orthodox Christian students at the Jesuit university.

The family also paid for an Orthodox iconostasis and iconography in the Copley Crypt Chapel on campus.

Psaros has served on Georgetown’s Board of Directors and now serves as vice chair of McDonough’s executive board of advisors and on the advisory board of the university’s endowment.

His Greek Orthodox faith and Greek American heritage run through the rest of his philanthropy.

The second-generation Greek American is an Archon of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. He has also been involved with the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine at the World Trade Center, the church rebuilt at Ground Zero after it was destroyed on September 11.

His family gave $60,000 to the Greek America Foundation’s volunteer corps on the island of Chios and pledged the same amount every year to fund the program permanently.

That gives young North Americans of Greek descent a way to serve in their ancestral homeland. In 2024, he was one of the distinguished Hellenes honored at a ceremony at the Acropolis Museum in Athens.

Georgetown recognized that record when Psaros gave the undergraduate commencement address for McDonough’s Class of 2025 and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.

He told the graduates that greatness comes from grit, determination, and character, and urged them to have a passion and never give up.

That advice now comes with a $25 million commitment, aimed at helping the markets that shaped his career serve the country he says he is repaying.