Elissa is a native of Ithaca, New York. She earned a BA in English from New York University. Among her early careers she especially cherishes her job as a laboratory technician at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and her three-year stint as manager of a service station in the Bronx. She subsequently received her MBA from Cornell’s Johnson School. After five years with the international public accounting firms Touche Ross & Co. and Coopers & Lybrand, she opened her own practice.

As a sole practitioner, Elissa provided consulting services including: design of cost accounting systems, production of accounting manuals, and preparation of business plans; business and personal decision analysis; and personal financial planning. Elissa’s business and enterprise clients included an insurance company, a real estate investment partnership, publishers, caterers, construction contractors and real estate developers, restaurants, exercise facilities and health clubs, a financial products partnership, and professional service organizations. Her individual and family clients included executives, scientists, teachers, artists, printers, lawyers, doctors, and writers. Her present practice is more limited, focusing on consulting assistance to entrepreneurs and artists of all kinds.

Elissa belongs to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the New Jersey Society of Certified Public Accountants, and the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants. For two years she was President of Women Entrepreneurs of New Jersey. She was Public Relations Chairman and Secretary of the Women Business Ownership Educational Coalition, Inc. She also served for two years on the Verona, New Jersey, Mayor’s Budget Review Committee.

Elissa is presently a Visiting Lecturer at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell, where she has taught Financial Statement Analysis and Valuation, Financial Accounting Principles, and Managerial Accounting. She recently participated as a faculty member in the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Disabled Veterans in its inaugural year at Cornell. The Cornell program is geared towards those veterans who have a special interest in the hospitality and real estate industries.

Elissa taught Entrepreneurship as an online course at Tompkins Cortland Community College in the spring of 2011. Elissa was for eleven years an associate professor in the Department of Accounting in the School of Business, Government, and Technology at Kean College of New Jersey, where she served as Director of the Accounting Internship Program and Director of the Writing Emphasis Program. Prior to teaching at Kean College, Elissa was an assistant professor at Montclair State College. She received a Merit Award for Teaching Excellence while at Kean.

Elissa has taught seminars for many groups and organizations. In June 2011, she served on a tax and law panel for The New York Foundation for the Arts in Brooklyn, and she gave a seminar to NYFA in June 2012 during their Syracuse MARK program.She conducts workshops for the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County on money matters for artists. Elissa has been interviewed on public service radio and television broadcasts in both her professional and volunteer capacities. She published LEDGER DOMAIN, a newsletter with information on financial planning, cost accounting, and other matters of interest to businesspeople. For one semester, Elissa was a Visiting Professional at New York University’s Stern Graduate School of Business. She was subsequently admitted with a full scholarship to the PhD program.

In 1991, Elissa took a leave of absence from NYU to travel to Tokyo, where she became Controller of Operations, Systems, and Telecommunications for Merrill Lynch Japan Inc. She then completed a special project for Johnson & Higgins of Japan Inc. She was also an Executive Training Consultant for Interac, Ltd., providing training for young Japanese who were coming to the United States for graduate study. Elissa also taught corporate finance at Sophia University’s Graduate Program in Comparative Culture and at Keio University’s International Center, and served for one year as treasurer of the Cornell Club of Japan.

Elissa returned to the United States in the fall of 1997, and resumed her accounting practice. She took a sabbatical from the active practice of accounting on December 31, 2002. In October 2005, she and her husband purchased a house, built in 1860, in Ithaca. They have been working on it ever since. A past president of the board of the Tompkins County Public Library Foundation, where she also served as Treasurer, Elissa remains a staunch supporter of the Library. Elissa currently serves as volunteer executive director of the Ithaca Community Orchestra, and as an Associate Director of The Kitchen Theatre Company.

 

Barry has managed diverse projects in the financial industry, notably in the asset management area, for more than twenty years. Such projects have revolved around the application of technology to business, and have included developing applications that assist investment decision-making and reporting; transforming the way application development and delivery are managed in a global firm; and managing global programs to outsource investment operations and to implement applications and associated business processes.

As a consultant, Barry has worked on numerous projects for major global asset management firms, as well as smaller firms such as hedge funds. These projects have included organizational reviews; managing a back-office outsourcing initiative; documenting complex business processes; specifying functional requirements for a portfolio management system for a quantitative equity manager; and, most recently, leading a global initiative to implement software and the associated business organization and processes to monitor and ensure compliance with contractual and regulatory restrictions on investment activity (using Fidessa LatentZero’s Sentinel application as the core). In his capacity as global program manager, he led a team with members and senior stakeholders located in London, Tokyo, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Sydney.

Before becoming a consultant, Barry held positions with Kidder, Peabody & Co., and then J.P. Morgan Investment Management (JPMIM). He spent six years on assignment for JPMIM to Japan, where he was responsible for the management of all aspects of the technology environment. He also headed the development of the Tokyo office’s business continuity and disaster recovery plans, and served on the New Product Committee and the Senior Management Team. On his return to the United States in 1997, he assumed leadership of the EMU project, whose scope was to implement the new European currency, the euro, across all facets of the institutional and private money management arms of J.P. Morgan in North America. He chaired the Asset Managers Forum’s Euro subcommittee, where he helped shepherd the U.S. investment management community through the euro implementation. He also served as a member of the Securities Industry Association’s (SIA) STP Buy-Side Committee, where he co-authored the SIA’s STP Buy-Side White Paper, and he has appeared as a speaker at meetings of the Investment Company Institute and ISITC-IOA. He was on the buy-side workshop panel at the May 2003 STP conference run by the SIA in New York.

Barry brings a wide array of skills to bear on his projects. To complement his thorough knowledge of the institutional asset management industry, he has the ability to maintain focus on the business objectives and drivers for an initiative, while also being able to delve deeply into detail when needed. Combined with talents for business case development and forward planning, this makes him an effective manager of project risk and stakeholder communication. He is universally known for always maintaining an independent point of view, unencumbered by the internal politics of his clients, and is committed to total honesty. Among his strongest points are the ability to align and manage teams who are broadly dispersed -- both geographically and organizationally -- around common goals, and to deliver those goals. Not a slave to any orthodoxy or methodology, he uses common sense approaches to achieve results. Barry operates effectively in a multicultural context, having delivered projects on three continents. He is committed to upholding the standards of the English language and produces written communications of all kinds at the highest level of quality and with attention to nuance.

Barry includes among his clients two of the largest asset management firms in the world: Barclays Global Investors and SSB Citi Asset Management (since acquired by Legg Mason). He has also advised Kinecta Federal Credit Union, Man Investments, Vyas Capital Management, and in the public sector, the Tompkins County (New York) Public Library Foundation.

Barry is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.