LEWISBURG — Chris Brown likes a challenge.

And the 47-year-old has found one.

Mr. Brown has become Bucknell University’s first chief investment officer, responsible for overseeing $600 million in investments within Bucknell’s endowment portfolio.

“Universities, in large part, are funded by endowments, and so the opportunity for the CIO is to administer, or manage, those assets in concert with the board of trustees,” said Mr. Brown, who joined the university May 19.

That board has an investment subcommittee, comprised mostly of investment professionals, he said.

Their job is to steward those assets for the long term, and to maintain the purchasing power of the portfolio, Mr. Brown said.

“Endowment funds are made to be used,” he said. “That’s key. We’re not trying to grow the endowment for the sake of the endowment.

“We want to grow it so that we can spend more, so that we can have more of the operating budget of the university paid by the endowment fund.”

Donations given when the university was founded in the 1800s are still giving, he said, to the growth and academic mission of the university.

“Our goal is to do that forever,” he said. “We want to make investments that will last and stand the test of time, but we get the benefit of not requiring, necessarily, real high liquidity in those investments.

“So we can benefit from and get higher returns from the liquid assets perhaps that other investment managers, who have shorter return time lines, might not be able to invest in. That’s one of the great things about endowments.”

Almost $100 million has come out of the endowment fund over the past five years to support the academic mission of the university, he said.

“And we want that to continue to grow over time,” he said.

One of Mr. Brown’s initial tasks in the first couple of quarters is to develop a long-term investment policy and asset allocation strategy for Bucknell’s portfolio.

His goal is to determine whether there are areas in the university’s investment policy that need to be updated or enhanced.

Another goal, he said, is to bring to the investment committee asset managers who he thinks “are the right folks to be managing the money, and to see if there are any new asset classes that we might want to think about investing in, whether it be real estate or what are referred to as real assets, like timberland or oil and gas.”

Mr. Brown’s aggressive investment expertise is one of the many reasons he was hired, said David Surgala, vice president for finance and administration.

“Hiring a CIO is a commitment to the stewardship of the university’s most important long-term financial asset, particularly as we prepare to enter our fundraising campaign,” Mr. Surgala said.

“With Chris, we have someone with the highest level of skill dedicated to professional management of the endowment and the donor’s gifts.”

Mr. Brown and his wife, Kimberly, are both Bucknell graduates. Their daughter, Emily, is a student at James Madison University. A son, Tom, is a junior in high school in Ridgefield, Conn., where Mr. Brown continues to live.

“At the moment, I’m staying there and commuting back and forth,” he said.

“It’s not a bad thing to have a base in Connecticut, and be closer to New York City. The asset managers and potential colleagues are there. A lot of industry hedge funds are based in Connecticut. And one of our managers is based out of Greenwich. So it’s actually kind of convenient that I’m located where I am.

“A big part of what I have to do is meet with those people.”