Please join us for a candid fireside chat with Roz Hewsenian, CIO of the Helmsley Charitable Trust, and Leah Emkin, WIIIN Board member and Head of Client Solutions at Wilshire. Roz will discuss her career journey in the financial services industry, along with lessons learned across the different phases of her career which have included roles as investment consultant at Wilshire, CEO of Clay Finlay, and CIO of the Helmsley Charitable Trust. The conversation will take place via Zoom and will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
Rosetta Analytics is an asset management firm that uses deep reinforcement learning to manage investment strategies. We are an emerging manager that is women-led and women-owned. Our two flagship investment strategies RL One and RL Carbon have strong performance with lower correlation to their underlying markets.
Prior to co-founding Rosetta Analytics, Julia spent 24 years building teams and offices at Wilshire Associates. She served as President of Wilshire Consulting and was a member of Wilshire’s Board of Directors and Wilshire Consulting’s Investment Committee. She led over 90 consulting professionals servicing more than 200 client relationships with AUA of over $1 trillion. She has a strong history and philosophy of portfolio risk management and research and expanded Wilshire Consulting’s business into Outsourced CIO and Risk Consulting services for clients. She has served as strategic consultant to large state and corporate pension funds, and endowment and foundation clients.
Julia speaks regularly at industry conferences on topics such as risk management, fiduciary issues, asset allocation and rebalancing, the market environment, and the evolution of the investment consulting business. She was recognized in May 2021 as one of four women named by The Hedge Fund Journal in its “Tomorrow's Titans 2021 List of 50 Managers” and also listed as a top Knowledge Broker in Chief Investment Officer magazine’s annual list of the world’s most influential investment consultants in 2015. Her publications include: "The Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index: The Logistics Behind Managing Broad-Based Indexes," Journal of Indexes, 3rd Quarter 2003; and "A Multi-Period Linking Algorithm that Has Stood the Test of Time," The Journal of Performance Measurement, Volume 7: Number 1.
Ms. Bonafede earned a B.S. in Marketing from the University of Colorado and an M.B.A. in Finance and Entrepreneurship from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the CFA Institute and is a founding member of the United Kingdom Society of Investment Professionals/CFA Society United Kingdom. She currently serves on the Standards of Practice Council for the CFA Institute.
Priscilla Guevara is the Head of Investor Relations of Science Inc., a Los Angeles-based startup studio and venture fund with a barbell investment strategy fueling disruptive early and late stage consumer companies. Founded in 2011, Science's portfolio has seen $1.3 billion in exits including Dollar Shave Club (acquired by Unilever) and DogVacay (merged with Rover, now going public through SPAC). It built two of the first & largest influencer networks on YouTube and Pinterest: FameBit (acquired by Google) and HelloSociety (acquired by New York Times). Today, Science’s portfolio includes notable companies such as PlayVS, Bird, MeUndies, Grove Collaborative, Mammoth Media, Liquid Death, and more. The firm recently closed a $310.5M IPO for its first SPAC, Science Strategic Acquisition Corp. Alpha.
Prior to Science, Priscilla served as an investor at ZX Ventures (Anheuser-Busch's CVC arm). In this role, Priscilla oversaw the technology platform, which included global deals in the supply chain & logistics and marketing/adtech space, among others. Additionally, she was an investor in sustainable assets on behalf of family offices, and led Strategy & Ops at SevenRooms and Business Development at Whispr Group. Further, her early international experience and expertise across Wall Street from Sumitomo Mitsui to Neuberger Berman and JCAM (Moore Capital), focusing on asset management and capital markets, complemented by a deep operational and regulatory foundation, has resulted in growth of $10B+ AUM.
She is currently the Chair of the Senior Women in Private Equity Group (West Coast Chapter) and an Active Member of 100 Women in Finance. She is also currently on the Development Committee of the James Beard Foundation, having previously served on the board of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (NYC Chapter) as the Chair of Society Ties, its young professionals group.
Priscilla holds a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School.
Nicole Neeman Brady is the CEO and Director of Sustainable Development Acquisition I Corp (NASDAQ: SDAC). As a public benefit corporation and pending B Corp, SDAC’s mission is to identify and partner with growth-oriented companies that are advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
She also serves on the board of various portfolio companies of Renewable Resources Group (RRG), an LA-based investment firm that owns, manages, and develops agriculture, water, and renewable energy assets in the US and internationally. Nicole was an Investment Committee member, fund manager and also responsible for overseeing all energy and water treatment investment and development opportunities. Nicole joined RRG following the firm’s acquisition of Edison Water Resources, a subsidiary of Edison International, a distributed water purification and recycling company where she was President and Founder. Nicole brings a diverse leadership history to RRG, including having been the Director of Energy Procurement at Southern California Edison (SCE) where she was responsible for all energy contracting and power, natural gas and emissions trading for the company – a $5 billion business. Prior to SCE, Nicole worked in strategic planning for Twentieth Century Fox and in private equity for Goldman Sachs.
She holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees, with honors, in architecture and in economics from Brown University and a Master of Business Administration degree, with distinction, from Harvard Business School.
Nicole currently serves as a Board Member of California Resources Corporation (NYSE: CRC), a Commissioner for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (the nation’s largest municipality), and a Board Director for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.
Felicia is responsible for Nuveen's distribution effort within the institutional consultant community in the western region of the U.S.
Prior to joining the firm in 2015, Felicia served in a business development capacity with American Realty Advisors, marketing private real estate to institutional investors.
Felicia graduated with a bachelor's degree in Economics from Lewis and Clark College. She is a member of the Association of Investment Management Sales Executives (AIMSE) and is a member of the Women in Institutional Investments Network of Los Angeles (WIIIN). Felicia holds the Series 7 and 63 securities registrations. She is a CFA charterholder and member of the CFA Institute and CFA Society of Los Angeles.
