Her Story
About Linsey
Linsey Lebowitz Hughes is a financial services executive, educator, and advisor with more than 25 years of experience across Wall Street, academia, and institutional leadership. She has built a career that bridges private sector finance and higher education, with deep expertise in hedge funds, investment banking, capital markets, recruitment strategy, compensation design, and organizational culture. Her work is widely focused on helping organizations understand and engage the next generation workforce, particularly in high-skill financial and investment environments.
She has spent the past 13 years at Duke University’s Department of Economics as an Executive in Residence, professor, mentor, and program leader. After relocating to the Durham, North Carolina area following a long Wall Street career, she reinvented her professional path by identifying a unique opportunity within a region anchored by Duke University, UNC, and NC State. With over 70,000 students in the surrounding area, she developed the concept for a “Hedge Fund 101” course aligned with her industry experience. After an initial introduction through a colleague in the Economics Department, she successfully pitched the idea, was invited to begin with an independent study, and has remained at Duke ever since. In addition to teaching, she leads the Dzialga Women in Finance program, mentors approximately 30 students, serves on the graduate admissions committee, and helps students differentiate between career paths in corporate finance, investment banking, mergers and acquisitions, and sales and trading.
Alongside her academic role, she continues to actively advise and invest in the finance industry through board service, startup mentorship, and hedge fund advisory work. She coaches student-led teams launching hedge funds and finance-related ventures, while also serving on boards for alumni-founded companies and initiatives. She is a co-founder of Hughes Forlines Advisory, which supports hedge funds in areas such as capital raising, marketing, hiring, and strategic positioning. Earlier in her career, she held roles at Deutsche Bank’s Hedge Fund Capital Group, HSBC, Credit Agricole, and Creditex, building extensive experience in financial markets and institutional investing. She is also a TEDx speaker at Duke University, where her talk “How to Get What You Want at Work” reflects her broader commitment to career development, leadership coaching, and helping emerging professionals define paths aligned with their strengths and ambitions.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Linsey
01What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
Do what you love, and choose great people. It's all about the people. If you surround yourself with great people, you can do any job. I mean, it's pretty incredible. I get a lot of students who will come to me and say they've been hired by Goldman Sachs for the summer or JP Morgan for the summer, and ask which group should they choose. I always look at them and say, people. Go with the best people who have the best attitudes. You can literally do anything if you're working with great people.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Go after what you want, but be a queen about it. Go after what you want in your career and be ambitious, but also allow things. Don't bring too much pushing energy to anything you do. Put it out there, work really hard, be excellent, and that effort will be mirrored right back to you. Stay close to the people that support you and that impact you, and give that back to them too. It's such a world of give and take in their personal and professional lives. The people that invest in the people around them get invested in. So it's this combination of hard work, putting it out there, and then letting things come back as well.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I would say a lot of university professors are pretty spooked about what AI is going to do to the profession. I'm not. I'm just kind of rolling with it and trying to help it make me more efficient, both as a teacher, as a grader, as a communicator. I'm also not trying to pretend with my students that nobody's using it. I talk to them really openly about how to use it efficiently. I think the professors that will become obsolete are the ones that try to sort of sweep it under the rug and not try to incorporate a more efficient way of teaching, learning, and communicating into their curriculum.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Probably mentorship, authenticity, and work ethic. I'm also a big believer that everything comes back to people and your network. If you're good to people, and you support them, and you're excellent at your job, that effort and that sentiment and that disposition get mirrored right back to you. Not only am I doing a tremendous amount of mentoring, but I'm also teaching a lot of the upperclassmen how to be great mentors, and that becomes really meaningful in their path. Not only is it very good for their growth, but also they love it. One of the best things is when you start off as a sophomore being clueless about what the finance industry is like and interviewing for internships, and by the time you're a graduating senior, you've done two internships and you're advising underclassmen how to go about their process. I really enjoy that process of mentoring and then creating future mentors.
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