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Samara Cohen, Senior Managing Director, is the Chief Investment Officer of the ETF and Index Investments (EII) business for BlackRock and a member of the firm’s Global Executive Committee.

As CIO for EII, Samara leads the teams responsible for delivering the market quality and investment integrity of BlackRock’s index funds and iShares ETFs. Encompassing portfolio engineers, risk managers, platform architects, market structure developers and product operating model designers, those teams seek to lead boldly in the modernization of the indexing industry and ETF markets to help more and more people achieve financial well-being. She is a member of the GEC Investment Subcommittee, the EII Management Committee, the Vote Issues Advisory Committee and is a senior advocate for the firm’s Black Professional’s Network.

Samara first joined BlackRock in 1993 as an analyst in the Institutional Client Business group. Prior to rejoining BlackRock in 2015, she was a Managing Director in the Securities Division of Goldman Sachs. She also served as Chief Operating Officer of Fixed Income, Currencies and Commodities (FICC) Americas Sales and led the Global Market Transition team, which developed and delivered solutions to clients in an evolving market structure and a changing regulatory environment. Previously Samara worked in Interest Rate Products at Goldman Sachs where she was responsible for developing strategies in interest rate and derivative markets for a broad range of institutional clients, including banks, insurance companies, asset managers and hedge funds.

Samara earned a BS Econ in Finance from the Wharton School and a BA in Theatre Arts from the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.