Cliff Asness and Deborah Kuenstner are Institutional Investor‘s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award winners.
Asness, a co-founder of AQR Capital Management, is this year’s recipient of II’s Hedge Fund Lifetime Achievement Award. Kuenstner, the chief investment officer at Wellesley College, is receiving II’s Allocators’ Choice Lifetime Achievement Award.
II will recognize the two at the 7th annual Allocators’ Choice Awards dinner, held in New York on September 12.
Kuenstner has overseen Wellesley College’s $2.9 billion endowment since 2009. During her tenure, the endowment has grown by more than $1 billion in assets.
Prior to joining Wellesley, her alma mater, Kuenstner served as the chief investment officer at Brandeis University. She built the university’s investment operation, hiring a team of four to bring the school’s endowment in-house. Before Brandeis, Kuenstner was a managing director of research for Fidelity Investments and CIO at Putnam Investments.
In addition to her professional contributions to the investment industry, Kuenstner serves as a member of the board of trustees at the Old South Church in Boston, as a director at Asset and Wealth Management Acquisitions, and as an investment committee member at the Roxbury Latin School.
Meanwhile, Asness started his financial career in the 1990s at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, where he became one of the first quantitative hedge fund managers. In 1998 he and three other Goldman alums launched AQR, which focuses on factor-based investing and has become one of the largest hedge funds in the world.
Asness’s research has been published in The Journal of Portfolio Management, Financial Analysts Journal, The Journal of Finance, and The Journal of Financial Economics.
Asness is a trustee for the American Enterprise Institute and the Atlas Society. He serves on the governing board at the Institute of Mathematical Finance at NYU, the ambassador board at the Journal of Portfolio Management, and the board at Q-Group. He is a member of the board of trustees and the investment committee for the National World War II Museum and is on the advisory board at the Adam Smith Society.
In addition to recognizing Asness and Kuenstner, II will reveal the winners of the Allocators’ Choice Awards at the dinner. The list of finalists is available here — qualified limited partners can vote for the winners. II will also recognize its allocator Rising Stars at the event.
