Holy Cross Women In Business Conference

Sheila Cavanaugh ’81, Senior Vice President, Fidelity Investments

Sheila Cavanaugh

Sheila Cavanaugh is a senior vice president of Fidelity Investments, the largest mutual fund company in the United States, the Number 1 provider of workplace retirement savings plans and a leading online brokerage firm. In this position, Ms. Cavanaugh oversees Fidelity’s internal communications activities for the firm’s 45,000 employees.

In her role at Fidelity, Ms. Cavanaugh leads a team of people dedicated to keeping Fidelity’s employees knowledgeable, informed and educated on the businesses of Fidelity, the market, the industry, and forces shaping the future of the firm.

Before joining Fidelity in 1996, Ms. Cavanaugh was a global strategies consultant with Coopers & Lybrand. Prior to Coopers, Ms. Cavanaugh was a banker in project finance at The Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, The Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan, and the Union Bank of Switzerland in Zurich. She also developed and ran the credit training program at the Investment Bank of Latvia in the former Soviet Union.

Following her career in banking, Ms. Cavanaugh took a sabbatical year to teach English with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees at a Vietnamese Refugee Camp in Southeast Asia. She returned to pursue a graduate degree at Yale, and subsequently spent two years at Harvard Business School publishing research on issues of competition and strategy for use in Harvard’s executive education and MBA programs. From Harvard, Ms. Cavanaugh became a Soros Foundation fellow and moved to the Baltic States to start one of the first credit training programs in banking after the fall of communism.

Ms. Cavanaugh holds an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a BA in economics from the College of the Holy Cross. She spent two years abroad at Bath University in England and the National University of Singapore. She is an International Rotary Scholar and a Paul Harris Fellow with Rotary International. Ms. Cavanaugh is an active volunteer in the Balkan refugee community, as well as a volunteer with the Catholic Schools Foundation and the International Institute of Boston, a refugee resettlement agency. Ms. Cavanaugh is a spokesperson for the American Heart and Stroke Associations, and a director on the Yale School of Management’s alumni board.

Ms. Cavanaugh is featured in More Than 85 Broads: Women Making Career Choices, Taking Risks, and Defining Success on Their Own Terms, by Janet Hanson. McGraw Hill, 2006.

Back to Women in Business Conference schedule of events >