Lisette Cooper
Lisette Cooper is the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of Athena Capital Advisors, an investment advisory firm that serves sophisticated private investors, endowments, and foundations. As CEO, she sets the firm’s overall direction and leads Athena’s Investment Committee. Lisette founded the firm in 1993, and, using techniques that were then available only to the largest institutional investors, helped a wide range of investors manage complex portfolios.Prior to founding Athena, Lisette served as Manager of Consulting Services for Barra Inc., now MSCI Barra. She and her team specialized in modeling risk and developing investment solutions for institutional investors. She spent five years as a Senior Strategist at Merrill Lynch, where she analyzed, designed, and marketed innovative securities to money managers, banks, and pension funds such as Bank of America, California Public Employees’ Retirement System and the Colorado PERA. Lisette has extensive experience in the hedge fund industry.She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University and holds a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University. In 2007 she and her co-authors were granted a patent titled “Deriving a Probability Distribution of a Value of an Asset at a Future Time.” Lisette is a CFA charterholder.