Lisette Cooper

PhD, CFA, Founder, Managing Director

Lisette Cooper is Chief Executive Officer and a Managing Director of Athena Capital Advisors. As CEO, she sets the firm’s overall direction and leads Athena’s Investment Committee. Lisette founded the firm in 1993.

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 policies for institutional investors. She spent five years as a Senior Strategist for 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 Public Employees’ Retirement Association of Colorado.

Lisette has extensive experience in the valuation of non-public financial instruments and has acted as an expert witness in cases involving fiduciary duty and prudent investment strategy and implementation. 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.