The Power of the Proxy in Retirement Plans

Jackie Cook is Director, Stewardship, Product Strategy & Development in Sustainalytics’ Stewardship services team. Up to October 2021, she was director of stewardship research for Morningstar Research Services LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Morningstar, Inc. In her present role, she leads the ESG Voting Policy Overlay offering, which offers clients a specialist ESG voting lens.

Cook joined Morningstar in October 2018 with Morningstar’s acquisition of Fund Votes Research Ltd., a company that she founded in 2007. Fund Votes had been a provider of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund proxy-voting data on corporate resolutions and shareholder proposals across ESG topics. Previously, Cook had been a senior research associate at The Corporate Library (which merged with GMI in 2010 and was acquired by MSCI in 2014) and a junior research fellow at the Centre for Business Research at the University of Cambridge. Over the past 22 years, she has also worked as a consultant on governance research projects for UNCTAD and several nongovernment organizations and has published academic articles on mutual corporate form, investor advocacy, and energy governance.

Cook holds a bachelor’s degree with honors in clinical psychology from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa, and a master’s degree in research psychology from Rhodes University, South Africa. She also holds a bachelor’s degree with honors in economics and management from Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Samantha Lamas is a behavioral researcher at Morningstar. She is a recipient of the Montgomery-Warschauer Award for her research in financial planning.

Lamas' research focuses on investor engagement and the factors that drive people's decision-making about investing and money. Her work delves into how people think about their financial goals, what they look for when seeking financial advice, and what kinds of mental shortcuts people use when making decisions about their personal finances.

Lamas joined Morningstar in 2016 as a product consultant working directly with the individual investor and advisor audience segments before moving into a research role.

Lamas holds a bachelor's degree in business with a concentration in finance from Dominican University. Follow Lamas on Twitter at @SamanthaLamas4 and on LinkedIn.

Email Samantha at Samantha.Lamas@morningstar.com.