David Kushner took home the award for Public Pension CIO of the Year. A veteran allocator with nearly five decades in the business, Kushner spent the past four years creating a private markets structure for the City of Austin Employees’ Retirement System from the ground up. The state-of-the-art system is now ready to make deals.  

As Kushner recently told Institutional Investor about his thoughtful approach: “It takes time and a process building this. We’d rather be slow and do it right than find out too late we’re locked in the wrong partnerships for ten years.”  

Allocators gathered at New York City’s Mandarin Oriental on Thursday evening for the ninth annual Allocators’ Choice Awards to celebrate such exceptional investors for their superlative work in another volatile year.  

The year has been marked by war, high inflation, climbing energy prices, and artificial intelligence disrupting every industry and sector. It is a period when savvy investors built forward-looking investment programs from scratch, increased their exposure to private assets, or restructured their portfolios to get the best out of choppy markets. This year’s ACA honorees demonstrated patience and levelheadedness during chaotic and fast-changing times while repositioning their portfolios for future growth.  

After finalists were fielded, vetted, and deliberated on by II’s staff, asset owners — pension funds, endowments, family offices, foundations, health care funds, and sovereign wealth funds — voted for the winners.  

Anurag Pandit of ALSAC/St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital won Healthcare System CIO of the Year for bringing sharper liquidity discipline to the $10 billion long-term portfolio. Pandit has cut managers with long lockups, pushed into liquid alternatives, sought less-crowded opportunities, and embraced AI to strengthen investment operations. Pandit has put his heart into the research hospital’s lifesaving mission, rallying the allocator community to support fundraising causes like battling sickle cell disease. 

This year’s award for Endowment/Foundation CIO of the Year went to New York University’s Michelle Knudsen after she rebuilt the school’s roughly $8 billion investment program in about two years. She hired a new team and restructured the portfolio under a new asset allocation and risk framework that she’s described as a middle ground between a traditional asset allocation and a total portfolio approach. Knudsen has deployed billions for emerging managers, niche credit, and quant strategies. 

Craig Sabal, CIO at New York Life Insurance Co., was named this year’s Insurance CIO of the Year. As part of a plan to grow the mutual’s roughly $380 billion general account by adding more complementary assets, Sabal is getting into residential mortgage loans. Sabal recently told II: “We are extremely purposeful in our portfolio construction and asset allocation.” 

Nicole Sherwood, founding CIO of Altman Family Holdings, was recognized as Family Office Investor of the Year. Since taking over Owl Creek founder Jeffrey Altman’s portfolio, Sherwood's peers have been impressed with the way she's improved the family’s private investment process and her ability to build institutional-level systems around complex portfolios.

This year’s award for Allocator Team of the Year went to the investment team at Hershey Trust Co. Before leaving the organization to launch her own advisory firm (L-Squared Investment Solutions), Leslie Lenzo restructured the team to separate investment operations from core investment roles. Team cohesion has been prioritized to create a more collaborative culture and a stronger investment platform.  

The YMCA Retirement Fund’s Hunter Reisner was voted Corporate CIO of the Year after he rebuilt the Y’s retirement portfolio and assembled an exceptional team (which includes one of this year’s Allocator Rising Stars) to run it more like an endowment than like a traditional corporate pension. Meanwhile, the Award for Leadership and Vision went to Doug Hanly, founder of Next CIO Institute and CIO of the Louisiana State Police Retirement System, for the time and effort he invests in mentoring the next generation of allocators. 

In addition to celebrating the rising stars among allocators and hedge funds, Jonathan Grabel, CIO of Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association, was honored at the event with the 2026 Allocator Lifetime Achievement Award, and Graham Capital’s Ken Tropin was this year’s Hedge Fund Lifetime Achievement Award Winner.