The University’s coffers swelled to $25.9 billion during Jack R. Meyer’s last fiscal year in charge of the endowment. But as Meyer took off on Friday, Harvard still had no permanent replacement for him and said a member of Harvard Management Company’s board of directors would steer the firm for now.

Peter A. Nadosy ’68, a former president of Morgan Stanley Asset Management, was named interim chief investment officer on Friday. The University’s treasurer, James F. Rothenberg ’68, said in an interview that Nadosy would oversee the endowment until a new chief executive is named.

The University has struggled to find a successor to Meyer, who announced his departure in January. He left Friday on another high note, after turning in investment returns of 19.2 percent for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2005.

But even as Meyer leaves the management company, he will remain closely tied to Harvard’s money. Rothenberg said the University would invest roughly $500 million in Meyer’s new hedge fund, Convexity Capital Management. And Meyer, along with his departing associates, will continue working as paid advisors to the University “for some time,” Rothenberg said. (See related story below.)

Nadosy, who served as chairman of Amherst College’s investment committee from 1988 to 2002, will assume his new position today. But he lives in New York, and Rothenberg said Nadosy would not be working in the management company’s Boston offices every day.

With total assets that stood at $25.9 billion at the end of last fiscal year, Harvard’s endowment remained leaps and bounds above its peers in higher education and more than $10 billion ahead of second-place Yale.

But Yale, with its $15.2 billion endowment managed almost entirely outside the university, beat Harvard last fiscal year with an investment return of 22.3 percent. The median return for the 25 largest university endowments was 15.8 percent last fiscal year, according to preliminary numbers reported by Harvard on Friday.

In a letter to the University community, Rothenberg called fiscal 2005 “another strong year for the Harvard endowment.”

Nearly every asset class outperformed its internal benchmark, investment goals set by the management company’s board based on market performance. Domestic and foreign bonds, traded by two fund managers who left Friday with Meyer, were once again out in front. Private equity, high-yield assets, and commodities also did exceptionally well.

Rothenberg said the search for Meyer’s replacement has been a “complicated” process but that he expected to find a new chief for Harvard Management Company soon. He said the search committee—which includes two former secretaries of the Treasury, University President Lawrence H. Summers and Harvard Corporation member Robert E. Rubin ’60—was in the process of interviewing specific candidates for the job. Nadosy is also a member of the committee.

“We’re well along,” Rothenberg said. “We’ve been talking to a lot of interesting people. I’m very pleased with the people we’ve spoken to.”

But until a new president is named, Harvard’s endowment will rest in the hands of Nadosy and the rest of the management company’s board, which Rothenberg chairs.

Nadosy, who joined the management company’s board two years ago, currently serves as advisory director of Morgan Stanley Asset Management, the bank’s investment arm. He was named president of the firm in 1985 and vice chairman in 1995, according to a University press release.

A former resident of Lowell House, Nadosy is a member of Harvard’s Committee on University Resources, an advisory group of major alumni donors. He also serves on the boards of directors for the World Wildlife Fund, the Markle Foundation, which is a nonprofit focused on health care and national security, and the Summit Foundation, an environmental group.

He was born in Hungary in 1944 and, after Soviet troops invaded the country to crush a popular uprising in 1956, fled to the U.S. He now serves on the board of the Central European University in Budapest.

Nadosy—whose daughter, Andrea P. Nadosy ’03, is also an alum—lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He also has a home in Southampton, N.Y., where he is a trustee of the St. Andrew’s Dune Church.

—Daniel J. Hemel contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu.