The 28th Annual
National Pension & Institutional Investor Summit

Elizabeth’s responsibilities include leading the agency’s accounting, financial reporting, budget, treasury, fare collections and fare payment systems, debt management, investment management, and risk management functions.
Formerly Elizabeth Reich began her service as the City of Dallas’ Chief Financial Officer in September 2016. In this role, Elizabeth is accountable for the financial policy and operations of the nation’s 9th largest city, with an annual budget of over $3 billion. Elizabeth provides executive leadership for budget, procurement, communication & information services, risk management, equipment & fleet management, accounting, investments, and managing some Federal grant funds. In addition, Elizabeth was instrumental in brokering a pension compromise that saved the Dallas Police and Fire Pension after years of mismanagement, risky investments, and expansions of already generous features.

Leveraging 35 years in asset management, Paul established Wendell Rhoads Consulting to help people and their organizations thrive with a more human approach to performance coaching, strategic advising, and recruiting. Before founding Wendell Rhoads, he led Olschwanger Partners, with a focus on complex executive searches. Most recently, while at Aon, Paul provided senior-level support for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and human capital development. There he coached over 300 investment professionals globally. A long-time board member of the CFA Society Dallas-Ft. Worth, he hosts their flagship podcast, Charterholder Chatter, and serves on the Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board for DCIIA. Paul earned a BBA in Finance from UT-Austin, completed the first AIMSE Investment Institute at The Wharton School, and earned a graduate certification in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Purdue University.

Jim Dolmas is an economic policy advisor and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. His main research interests are in the field of macroeconomics, where he has worked on such topics as the costs associated with business cycles, the effectiveness of stabilization policy, inflation measurement, and the politico-economic determinants of inflation, taxation and immigration policy. His research has appeared in scholarly journals such as International Economic Review, Review of Economic Dynamics and Journal of Economic Dynamics & Control.
Dolmas holds a PhD in economics from the University of Rochester and a bachelor’s degree with honors in economics from the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the Dallas Fed in June 2000, he taught economics at the undergraduate and graduate level at Southern Methodist University. He has also taught at the University of Rochester and the University of Texas in Austin.
Dolmas developed and maintains the Dallas Fed’s Trimmed Mean PCE inflation rate. In addition to briefing the Bank’s president on national economic conditions, Dolmas writes monthly analyses of inflation data for the Bank’s website.

Meredith is a consultant and award-winning author of Women of The Street: Why Female Money Managers Generate Higher Returns (And How You Can Too).
She was named one of Inc. magazine’s “17 Inspiring Women To Watch in 2017” and was named a Distinguished Author by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018. She has been a regular columnist for Institutional Investor and Market Watch.
A sought-after speaker, Meredith has presented research in Tokyo, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Sydney, Geneva and more. She delivered a TEDx talk at TEDxUIUC in 2018 and testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee on Diversity and Inclusion in June 2019. Meredith also is on the Board of Directors for Rock the Street, Wall Street, a non-profit that provides financial and investment literacy courses for high school girls and she provides mentoring for female entrepreneurs in Nashville through the Pathway Women’s Business Center.
She began her investing career at Van Hedge Fund Advisors International (VAN), as Director of Research. At VAN, Meredith was responsible for manager selection, due diligence, index construction and aggregate hedge fund industry research for the $500 million fund of funds.
Meredith was then recruited by hedge fund analytics provider PerTrac Financial Solutions. At PerTrac she focused on industry trends with an eye to providing actionable insights and information. Her research on emerging managers (initiated in 2006) and women and minority-owned funds created new investment categories. It has changed the way investors and money managers behave - both in the way investors allocate and how money managers market to and seek investors.
Meredith then went on to be Director at Barclays Capital Strategic Consulting Group. There she consulted for clients and authored white papers, including her first paper on women and minority-owned investing. She was recruited to Rothstein Kass, a professional services firm with a focus on alternative investments, from Barclays. There Meredith served as Director of the Rothstein Kass Institute, an Alternative Investment Think Tank and created the first Women in Alternative Investments Hedge Fund Index to measure performance of female hedge fund and private equity managers.
Meredith is a foodie and cultivates a love of charcoal and open flames in her cooking. She is also an avid figure skater and relies on an inexplicable addiction to decaffeinated coffee to survive early morning ice times.

Derrick provides leadership, vision, and oversight for the management and strategic growth of the Fund’s $2.25 billion in assets, working closely with the Fund’s Executive Director, Benita Harper, and with the Board and its Investment Committee as well as Fund staff.
Dagnan previously served as Deputy Chief Investment Officer of the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System, where he oversaw a team managing a large state pension plan and several small endowment and defined contribution plans. Dagnan received his BS from Purdue University and his MBA in Finance and Strategy from the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. He is a CFA Charterholder.

Janet Handley serves as an advisor to the Finance & Investment Committee.
Ms. Handley graduated Summa Cum Laude from Texas A&M University in 1975 with a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics. She began her career at Shell Oil in Houston and began working for the Shell Pension Trust in 1993, and directed the Equities portfolio at the time she left in 2001.
Ms. Handley launched the Investment Office for the Texas A&M Foundation in April 2001 when it had assets of about $400 million. She built the staff to a total of four and the assets grew from $400 million to approximately $1.5 billion at the time of her retirement at the end of 2016. Additionally, she migrated the portfolio from one consisting almost exclusively of public equities and bonds to a highly diversified ‘endowment-style’ portfolio.
Ms. Handley serves on the Board of Directors for UTIMCO. This investment management company has assets under management of over $45 billion. Its ‘flagship’ asset is the PUF (Permanent University Fund) which provides funding to both The University of Texas and Texas A&M University. She has previously served on the Investment Committee for the Society of Petroleum Engineers and the Venture Capital Advisory Board for Commonfund Capital.

Louis LaValle is a Managing Director for 3iQ Digital Assets (US) with 20 years of institutional investment experience across both public and private markets. Prior to joining 3iQ in 2021, he was Senior Vice President at Neuberger Berman advising clients on the firm’s Private Markets investment platform, which included Private Equity/Venture, Private Credit and Hedge Fund strategies. Prior to this, Louis served as Global Head of Business Development at EACM Advisors, a multi-strategy hedge fund subsidiary of BNY Mellon. Previously, he was Senior Vice President at The Permal Group and Global Head of Platform Distribution at SkyBridge Capital. He began his career in investment management working with HNW individuals and institutional clients of Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. Louis graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Arts in History (hons).

Jim Stringham is a Senior Investigator in the Dallas Regional Office for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA). He has conducted numerous complex investigations involving multiemployer plans, employee stock ownership plans, alternative investments, and fiduciary misconduct. Jim began his career at EBSA in the Los Angeles Regional Office before transferring to Dallas in 2016. Prior to joining EBSA, Jim administered decedent trusts and estates with the Public Administrator’s Office for Orange County, California, and worked as a Deputy Sheriff with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Jim has received his Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice and his Master’s degree in Political Science from California State University, Fullerton.
The Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) for the US Department of Labor is responsible for the administration and enforcement of the civil and criminal provisions of Title I of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) as well as related provisions of other Federal laws, such as Federal criminal statutes that apply to ERISA-covered plans. The agency accomplishes this mission by developing effective regulations; assisting and educating workers, plan sponsors, fiduciaries, and service providers; and vigorously enforcing the law. Supervisory Investigator James Stringham from EBSA’s Dallas Regional Office will discuss current EBSA pension-related enforcement initiatives for 2023, fiduciary responsibility with respect to ERISA-covered plan assets, and what to expect from a Department of Labor investigation.