Yaron Brook

Yaron Brook
Brook speaking at a Tea Party Patriots event.
Native name	ירון ברוק
Born	(1961-05-23) May 23, 1961 (age 55) Israel
Occupation	Executive director of Ayn Rand Institute

Yaron Brook (Hebrew: ירון ברוק‎‎; born May 23, 1961) is an Israeli-born American entrepreneur, author, and former academic, who currently serves as the president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, a non-profit organization in Irvine, California that promotes the novels of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism.

Yaron Brook was born and raised in Israel (by parents who were Jewish socialists from South Africa). A friend lent him a copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged when he was sixteen, leading to his embrace of Objectivism. He served as a First Sergeant in Israeli military intelligence (1979–1982) and earned a BSc in Civil Engineering from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa (1986). In 1987, he moved to the United States, where he received his MBA and PhD in finance (1989, 1994) from the University of Texas at Austin. For seven years he was an award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University in California, and in 1998 he co-founded (with Robert Hendershott) a financial advisory firm, BH Equity Research, of which he is presently a managing director and chairman. He became an American citizen in 2003.