Dan Concannon
Chief Executive Officer
Dan Concannon brings to GMI Ratings extensive leadership experience in businesses providing research-based solutions to institutional, broker-dealer and issuer markets. Before he joined GMI Ratings, Mr. Concannon served as Global Head of Sales and Business Development at Mediant Communications and, earlier, WealthEngine. Prior to these roles, he was Executive Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Business Development at Institutional Shareholder Services where he grew sales from $30 million to $110 million and built a global sales organization with local presence in major financial centers around the world. In 2007, Dan played an instrumental role on the executive team that sold ISS to New York-based RiskMetrics Group, which subsequently went public. Mr. Concannon graduated with a B.S. degree in marketing from the University of Maryland and earned his Masters degree from Baruch College.
Deborah Coffrin
Chief Financial Officer
Ms. Coffrin has more than 25 years of experience in finance and accounting, particularly in the areas of mergers and acquisitions. She previously served as CFO of TD Insurance, the largest insurance group in New England, and she was Treasurer and Senior Vice President of Kinney Pike Bell & Connor, a large insurance agency in Vermont. She also served as Controller at United Vermont Bancorporations, a bank holding company in Vermont. Ms. Coffrin holds a B.S. in Business and an A.D. in Computer Science from Castleton State College. She received a C.P.A. designation from the State of Michigan and was certified with the National Association of Certified Valuation Analysts.
Shauna Morrison
Chief Operating Officer
Shauna Morrison leads GMI Ratings’ data management, editorial operations, new product development and the Diverse Director DataSource (3D), the firm’s proprietary database of diverse candidates for positions on boards of directors.
Prior to GMI Ratings, Shauna served as Vice President of Business Development and Marketing at Z-CARD and Vice President of Content for The College Board, where she was responsible for managing the association’s website, producing student and parent collateral as well as managing data collection for and production of College Board student guides as well as various data collection efforts for College Board’s AP, CLEP, Membership and other programs.
From 1984 through 2000, Ms. Morrison served in various roles at Standard & Poor’s, including Vice President of Operations, Retail Investor Services, Editor-in-Chief of PersonalWealth (online investment site for brokers and individual investors) and Publisher of S&P Stock Reports, MarketScope and MarketScope Europe as well as other professional products and publications. She was a member of S&P’s Index Committee and held NASD Securities licenses 2 and 65, as a registered investment advisor during her tenure at Standard & Poor’s. Ms. Morrison holds a BA from Duke University.
Howard Sherman
Executive Director
Howard Sherman, Executive Director, is Head of Sales and Global Business Development for GMI Ratings. He also serves as Treasurer and a member of the Board of Directors of the IRRC Institute, a not-for-profit organization headquartered in New York City that serves as a sponsor of environmental, social and corporate governance research.
Howard is the former chief executive of Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), now part of MSCI, and of Thomson Financial Investor Relations, now part of Thomson Reuters. He is a founding member of the International Corporate Governance Network and the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets.
Howard has worked in the corporate governance field since 1986, when he joined the Investor Responsibility Research Center as senior analyst. Before joining IRRC he worked for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Howard is a frequent speaker before both institutional investor and corporate audiences and the author of numerous articles and op-ed pieces in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Pensions and Investments and Directors and Boards. He is the co-author of several major reports on corporate governance, including Structural Imbalances in Japanese Corporate Governance with Bruce Babcock, Conflicts of Interest in the Proxy Voting System with Jamie Heard, and The Market Impact of Corporate Governance Ratings with John Bodt.
Howard holds an MBA from the Wharton School and a BA in Economics from George Washington University. He has been listed in various editions of Who’s Who since 1991 and was elected to The Directorship 100 in 2010.
Kimberly Gladman, CFA, Ph.D
Managing Director, ESG Research
Kimberly Gladman oversees GMI Ratings’ research reports, as well as its custom research and advisory practice. She has written widely on topics in corporate governance and responsible investment, and in 2012 was recognized as one of the industry’s leading corporate governance analysts in the Independent Research in Responsible Investment (IRRI) survey of asset managers conducted by Thomson Reuters Extel and SRI-CONNECT.com.
Before joining GMI Ratings’ predecessor, the Corporate Library, in 2008, Dr. Gladman directed a team of associates researching global corporations at Domini Social Investments, a leading responsible investment fund manager. She also served as Lead SRI Analyst for Domini’s European fund, and spent several years participating in the firm’s shareholder advocacy on social, environmental, and governance issues. Prior to joining Domini in 2001, Dr. Gladman had an academic career, focused on interdisciplinary research and teaching. For several years in the early 1990s, she taught business executives involved in reunification-related ventures in Hamburg, Germany.
Dr. Gladman earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1990, a Ph.D. from New York University in 2001, and the Chartered Financial Analyst designation in 2007. She currently serves on the Committee on Socially Responsible Investing of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Research Advisory Committee of US-SIF, and the Steering Committee of the Principles for Responsible Investment Academic Network.
Lev Janashvili
Managing Director, Sales & Marketing
Lev Janashvili brings to GMI Ratings 16 years of experience in managing marketing and communications strategies for public and private companies, industry associations and non-profit organizations. Before joining GMI Ratings, Mr. Janashvili held senior positions at several global public relations firms, including Waggener Edstrom and The Ruder Finn Group. In these positions, he advised clients on marketing, corporate communications, investor relations, crisis communications, mergers and acquisitions, and opinion research.
Lev has written extensively about complex issues facing public companies and their advisors. At Waggener Edstrom, he developed a quarterly survey series called “Investors in Innovation” focusing on investor perceptions of innovation-driven industries. His articles have also tackled the SEC’s Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD), issuer-sponsored equity research, and the need for improvements in financial-community opinion research. He has also published several studies on institutional investors’ perceptions of various markets, industries and controversial issues (e.g., alternative energy, Russian stocks, innovation, mark-to-market accounting, etc.).
He holds a BA Magna Cum Laude from Yeshiva University. In 2003, he completed graduate coursework in Organizational Psychology and Behavioral Finance at Columbia University.
Ric Marshall
Chief Analyst and Director of Development
A founding principal of The Corporate Library, a GMI Ratings predecessor firm, Mr. Marshall is responsible for GMI Ratings’ product design and development. Mr. Marshall is the chief architect of some of GMI Ratings’ pivotal product innovations, including the Board Analyst director database and the Governance Information Screening Tool (GIST). Together with former analyst Jackie Cook, he also developed the Board Analyst Director Interlocks Tool, the first commercial application of social network theory in this field.
Mr. Marshall is a co-inventor, with Robert A.G. Monks, of Brightline, a computer-based modeling program that simulates and statistically analyzes the effects of specific types of corporate behavior on long-term investment value.
Mr. Marshall has been involved in corporate governance research since 1996. Prior to the founding of The Corporate Library, he was the Chief Information Officer of Lens Investment Management, and worked closely with the firm’s British partner, the Hermes Focus Fund (formerly Hermes Lens). Prior to this, he served as an IT and graphic design consultant for clients including Lens Investment Management and Institutional Shareholder Services. Mr. Marshall has been a guest speaker and panelist at corporate governance conferences throughout the United States and has written extensively on investing in corporate governance.
Ric is a former trustee of Spring Harbor Hospital, a public non-profit psychiatric hospital serving southern Maine, and NAMI Maine, the Maine affiliate of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.
Agnes Grunfeld
Managing Director, AGR Research
Ms. Grunfeld has worked in the financial services industry for the past 30 years, specializing in quantitative analysis of fixed-income securities, portfolio management, and the associated software development and support.
Before joining Audit Integrity, a GMI Ratings predecessor firm, Ms. Grunfeld worked at Citigroup Investments for six years, providing quantitative analytic support to fixed-income traders, portfolio managers, the credit research team and risk managers. Prior to Citigroup, Ms. Grunfeld spent eight years at Capital Management Sciences where she was a Senior Analyst concentrating on financial modeling and advanced investment applications. Early in her career, Ms. Grunfeld worked at L.F. Rothschild, Unterberg & Towbin as a credit analyst, and was an equity analyst for Goldman Sachs.
She holds a BA from Brooklyn College (CUNY) and a Master’s degree from Columbia University. She is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).
Naveen Reddy
Director of Ratings
Mr. Reddy joined GMI Ratings in 2002 shortly after its inception, and is now Director of Ratings. He has been involved in various functions at GMI ranging from primary research to operations, and has developed broad knowledge of international corporate governance, including Southeast Asian markets such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Prior to GMI, Mr. Reddy served as a consultant to Pepsi Bottling Group, where he led company wide internal software distribution. From 1994-1998, Mr. Reddy served at the Global System Integrator Logica Plc, and eventually managed all US based information technology systems.
Mr. Reddy holds a BA in Economics from Boston College and MBA in Finance and Operations from the University of Southern California.