Janis Is a Managing Director at the Sorenson Impact Institute, David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah, where she leads the Institute’s Impact Finance group. Janis is a pioneer in outcomes-based financing field and has extensive impact finance experience. Janis received an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Economics and Political Science from Yale College. In 2015, Janis took a leave of absence from the Institute to join the Obama Administration as a Pay for Success Fellow and lead the Department of Education’s Pay for Success initiative. She was a Senior Policy Advisor to the Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA) providing expertise on the Maternal, Infant, Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Pay for Outcomes authority. Prior to joining the Institute, Janis was Director of Early Childhood and Education Policy for the nonprofit Voices for Utah Children where she led efforts to secure state funding for early childhood programs and was the architect of the Utah High Quality Preschool Program Social Impact Loan, the first early childhood Pay for Success project in the country.
Janis has 15 years of experience on Wall Street structuring innovative financial transactions. She has experience in project finance, and corporate and utility debt and equity new issuance; however, her expertise is in structuring whole loan and agency collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs). She was the lead structurer for the securitization of the Resolution Trust Corporation’s (RTC) Savings and Loan assets and worked closely with Moody’s to develop the final structure that saved millions of dollars in credit enhancement for the RTC. Janis’s tenure on Wall Street included working at The First Boston Corporation, UBS Securities and Bear Stearns & Co, among others. Janis has been an adjunct professor in the finance department of the Gore School of Business at Westminster College and the economics department at the University of Utah.