NEW YORK, N.Y., May 21, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via PRWEB - The New York Society of Security Analysts (NYSSA) is pleased to announce that its Board of Directors has appointed Karen Sterling, Ph.D., CFA, as its Interim Executive Director effective May 1, 2014. Dr. Sterling's appointment as Interim Executive Director was made in light of the Society's desire to remain a leader in financial markets thinking and education.
Speaking about the NYSSA board's appointment of Dr. Sterling to her new position, Society Chairman, Mark Ukrainskyj, CFA, said "The Board would like to thank Dr. Sterling for making herself available as the Interim Executive Director at this exciting time of transition for the Society. Dr. Sterling brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in the financial services industry and we are confident she will do a wonderful job engaging the NYSSA membership and the financial community at large as the Society continues to build its impressive portfolio of programs and events."
Dr. Sterling is taking on her new role at NYSSA after long experience at the Society, where she has been an active member since 2003. She was elected to the Board of Directors in 2010, and has been a member of the board's Executive Committee since 2011. She has resigned the Vice Chairmanship to take on her new post.
About taking on this new role at NYSSA, Dr. Sterling said, "NYSSA has a brilliant and energetic group of members, many of them distinguished investment and financial services professionals, who engage with each other and the public on topics of interest and who help shape the dialogue in the evolving landscape of finance. I look forward to supporting their valuable contributions to the financial community, through the production of more high quality events that will be open to both members and the general public."
"NYSSA has been an intellectual leader in the financial profession since its founding in 1937," Sterling said, "and one of the goals for my tenure with NYSSA is to help the Society build on this legacy, working with our members and our Board to keep NYSSA vital and visionary."
Dr. Sterling brings broad financial markets experience to her new position at NYSSA. She is currently the Managing Director of healthcare investment banking at Avalon Group, a boutique broker dealer where she offers fundraising and strategic advisory services to companies in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical devices, healthcare services, and healthcare IT sectors. She will continue her affiliation with Avalon while serving the NYSSA membership.
Most recently, she acted as strategic advisor and Interim Chief Financial Officer to a genetic diagnostics company headquartered in Seattle, WA that maintains laboratory facilities in Charleston, SC. Prior to being Managing Director at Avalon, she was Vice President and Senior Analyst at Fridson Investment Advisors, an investment management firm specializing in corporate credit opportunities, and prior to that, quantitative and fundamental analyst at Martin Fridson's FridsonVision.
Until 2009, she also published equity research reports and financial analysis of life science companies through Karen Sterling Bio-Pharma Insight. She has published widely in the peer reviewed financial press, in publications such as the Journal of Fixed Income, Journal of Portfolio Management, and The Investment Professional, and has been a keynote and featured speaker at various financial markets conferences. She was awarded the Chartered Financial Analyst designation in 2006.
Dr. Sterling earned two masters degrees and a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biophysics from Columbia University. She completed her undergraduate work in biochemistry at the Technical University of Hannover, Germany and is a native speaker of German. In 2005, while deployed to Antarctica as a research scuba diver on an NSF-funded project, she became the only financial analyst in history to update her equity research coverage via satellite from a remote field camp on the Antarctic continent.
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