Credit: Alan Barnett Photography
By Jesse Pound, Pensions & Investments
The Museum of American Finance honored two titans of money management at its 2026 Gala on March 5, with Baird Advisors founder and Chief Investment Officer Emeritus Mary Ellen Stanek and Dimensional Fund Advisors founder and Chairman David Booth taking home hardware.
Stanek, who was recognizing in Pensions & Investments’ inaugural class of Influential Women in Institutional Investin, was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award. Stanek’s career accolades include pioneering the use of duration analysis in bond funds, which received an early test after Baird rolled out the first strategies in the late 1970s.
“Six months later, much to our surprise at the time, Paul Volcker and the Fed did what they did. ... As it turns out we already had a leg up, because we already had a better tool than what was being used at the time,” Stanek said in her acceptance speech at the New York City event.
Stanek, who is also president of Baird Funds, is still an active portfolio manager for Baird. For a bond manager, being called “sleep insurance” by a client is a “badge of honor,” Stanek said.
“We’ve succeeded by consistently hitting a lot of singles, once in a while a double, but trying not to strike out or hit for the fences,” she said.
Booth, whose firm was a trailblazer in applying academic financial research to asset management, accepted the Financial Innovation Award. In his speech, Booth recalled some technical issues he had in starting Dimensional out of his apartment in Brooklyn in the 1980s, particularly with the local telephone company.
“They really weren’t ready for a start-up business. So when I called them to get six telephone lines, they wouldn’t give them to me. They thought I was a bookie,” Booth said.
Dimensional now has $1 trillion in assets under management.
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