Alumna Penny Dyson Foley, Class of 1963, came to Shipley in 9th grade as a boarding student from a rural Pennsylvania town. She was involved in Chorus, the French Club, the Hobohemians, and the Beacon. She was voted Most Discombobulated by her classmates.

After Shipley, Ms. Foley earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Hollins College and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Her first job out of college in 1967 was as an economic researcher for the Federal Reserve Bank, and so was launched her impressive—in both longevity and achievement—lifetime career in investment management.

In the late 1960s, Ms. Foley moved to New York to accept a position at Lehman Brothers, where she was hired as a statistician, essentially relegating her to second-class citizen status in the firm. After working to establish herself, Ms. Foley continued to grow in her career and in the mid-1970s moved to Citibank. Encouraged to focus on international investing, Ms. Foley devoted herself to the study and process of investing in emerging markets like Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia. In fact, it was as Vice President in Capital Markets Groups at Citibank in 1978 that Ms. Foley and her team arranged a three billion dollar standby credit line for the Canadian government, the largest syndicated loan ever offered at that point.

After working around the world and studying the processes of international markets for three decades, Ms. Foley went to Drexel Burnham Lambert to set up trading for international debt in emerging markets. There she launched a fund that is still active, with just under seven billion dollars in assets, and which she still runs. Now Ms. Foley is Group Managing Director at Trust Company of the West, splitting her time between the company’s Los Angeles and Manhattan offices, and she manages the firm’s 11 billion-dollar emerging markets fixed income business.

To be successful in her work, Ms. Foley traveled the world, but she has also gotten involved in it. Ms. Foley’s interest in the cultures she researches led her to become involved in a non-profit organization called Trickle Up, which offers venture capital and business training to impoverished women in Central America, West Africa, and India. In addition to her role as Board Chair for Trickle Up, Ms. Foley also serves on the Board of Kids in Sports, a Los Angeles non-profit that provides after school sports programs for at-risk youth, and she serves on the investment committees of both Hollins College and the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, which supports breast cancer research. It probably won’t surprise you to know that she is also a dedicated member of Shipley’s Board of Trustees.

Despite, perhaps, being discombobulated, Ms. Foley has been a maverick—not just for women, but for all investment professionals—and has stared down Wall Street gatekeepers with courage in order to pursue her passion. Recognizing her outstanding achievements as a pioneer in investment banking and her dedication to working in emerging markets around the globe, we honor her today with the 2013 Distinguished Alumni Award.