Jenna Stauffer ’18
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Jenna spent her time as a Sustainable Investing Fellow on the Morgan Stanley Wealth Management Investing with Impact team. During this time, her main objective was to create a toolkit for foundations seeking to align human capital, market-rate investments and philanthropic capital with mission. Further contributions included analyzing multiple asset managers' financial and impact performance data in order to create client-facing materials, as well as collaborating with both internal and external groups to advance additional sustainable investing goals and initiatives.

Marina Fenley ’18
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Marina is a MIA-MBA dual degree student at Columbia’s School of Internal and Public Affairs and Columbia Business School. With a background in finance and a passion for sustainability, she was interested in how a firm such as Morgan Stanley was adapting to a world where ESG investing strategies are becoming mainstream. During the summer, she worked with the Sustainability Research team to understand how to incorporate ESG metrics into traditional equity research. Her focus was on the Latin America region and understanding which factors are most material for companies listed and/or operating in the region. The key takeaway was that, even though not all ESG issues can be easily quantified and priced into the valuation analysis, there are many ways of qualitatively adjusting models to reflect the most relevant risks.

Sanya Thapa ’18SIPA
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Sanya is an MIA candidate at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and was an energy equity research associate before graduate school. Driven by her experiences growing up in Nepal, she is focused on understanding how private capital can create positive social and environmental impact in developing countries. As a fellow at the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing, she conducted research on a range of trends and issues in sustainable investing. She analyzed fund performance across a spectrum of traditional and socially responsible mutual funds to help debunk the myth that sustainable investing requires a financial tradeoff. She also researched how investors are incorporating place-based themes into their investments, and looked at program related investments as a vehicle for foundations to maximize impact. Finally, she conducted a broad survey on environmentally-focused private equity funds in emerging markets, participating in meetings and conference calls with fund managers. The key takeaway for her this summer was that sustainable investing has many stakeholders and has immense capacity to expand its reach in the coming years.