Austen Riggs Center Names Wall Street Finance and Technology Veteran Joseph Coleman Chief Financial and Operations Officer

September 1, 2026 — Stockbridge, MA — The Austen Riggs Center has appointed finance and technology expert Joseph Coleman as its new Chief Financial and Operations Officer, effective September 8. With over 25 years of leadership experience at JPMorgan Chase, Coleman’s arrival fulfills a top priority that Medical Director and CEO Oscar Hills, set out when he took the helm of Riggs on July 1: building a leadership partnership that the Center needs to thrive in a highly competitive behavioral health treatment environment.

Coleman’s experience at JPMorgan Chase, including 15 years as a Managing Director, features expertise in complex financial and operational initiatives across the firm’s Markets Technology and Quantitative Research organizations, partnering with senior stakeholders on major technology and quantitative research investments to strengthen capabilities and controls, drive efficiency, and support strategic decision-making.

“Riggs is proud of its history as a mission-driven, nonprofit institution,” said Hills. “At the same time, we are keenly aware of the pressures behavioral health treatment centers face today. In hiring Joe, we’ve brought on someone with a level of financial expertise that will help guide us as we work to preserve what makes Riggs unique, while positioning us to not just meet, but anticipate, the places where we need to evolve.”

Coleman’s background spans budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting and analysis, risk management and governance, vendor and contract oversight, and building diverse, high-performing teams across functions and disciplines. As Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer of JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office, he oversaw a global organization that significantly simplified the CIO’s systems platform in support of a multi-hundred-billion-dollar global portfolio. He later served as a senior leader in Markets Technology and Quantitative Research managing shared technology and analytics services for the firm’s market making businesses.

Coleman retired from JPMorgan in 2025 and has since been based full-time in Great Barrington, MA. While new to the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, he brings a disciplined, collaborative approach and a strong record of translating complex financial and operational challenges into clear, executable plans.

In his message to the Riggs community upon his arrival, Hills was candid that this has been a difficult period for Riggs—one marked by census pressures and hard staffing decisions—but also one defined by opportunity. He described the CFOO hire as a major step in a broader effort to strengthen Riggs for the long term, one that would open the door to work he is eager to take on together with the Riggs community: extending Riggs’ distinctive clinical model to more patients, growing the online IOP program beyond Massachusetts and Vermont, and pursuing new fundraising relationships.

With Coleman’s appointment, Riggs is now positioned to move forward on the next key initiative Hills has laid out: a center-wide strategic planning process grounded in Riggs’ core mission. That process will be developed openly and with broad input from Riggs’ constituent groups to chart a realistic, forward-looking course for the institution’s future.

 

The Austen Riggs Center is an open psychiatric residential treatment center and therapeutic community, as well as an institute for education, research, and advocacy in mental health. Located in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts, Riggs has served adults since its founding in 1919. In addition to its residential program, Riggs offers a fully online course of treatment for college students and other emerging adults in Massachusetts and Vermont through its Online Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP). Riggs focuses on understanding the psychological dilemmas underlying symptomatic behavior so that individuals can increasingly take charge of their lives. Through its Erikson Institute for Education, Research, and Advocacy, Riggs also conducts research, professional training, and community outreach locally and beyond. For more information, visit www.AustenRiggs.org.

 

Media Contact:
Aaron Beatty
Communications Officer
Austen Riggs Center
413.931.5245
aaron.beatty@austenriggs.net