The Nevada Public Employees’ Retirement System’s deputy chief investment officer Lauren Larson has succeeded longtime investment chief Steve Edmundson as CIO. 

Edmundson confirmed the move over email, adding that he has been promoted to executive officer, replacing Tina Leiss, who left NV PERS after more than 22 years to pursue a new opportunity. Larson joined NV PERS in 2021, first as chief financial officer, before becoming deputy CIO.

Under Edmundson, the $79 billion state plan has generated consistent long-term returns with a purely passive public portfolio. Since being named CIO in December 2012, Edmundson developed a reputation for outperforming other public plans while deliberately doing as little as possible. He indexed Nevada’s publicly traded stock and bond exposure, making very few moves over the years in response to geopolitical or market events.

This passive approach has paid off: Long-term returns for NV PERS have remained relatively consistent. Nevada’s annualized rate of return has been 9.5 percent since the fund’s inception in 1984—above the long-term actuarial objective of 7.25 percent. NV PERS returned 11 percent for its 2025 fiscal year. 

In October, Edmundson told Institutional Investor that “indexing is the most efficient way to access the market exposures we want in the allocation.” 

In addition, because the portfolio is mostly in index funds and cash, the fund has kept fees lower than most public plans. “They’re the leanest and simplest,” Michael Markov, founder of the investment analytics firm Markov Processes International had told II in 2023, adding that Edmundson ran “the most efficient fund in the nation out of large pensions.”