Why Cathie Wood is on this page

Catherine Duddy Wood (born 1955) is an American investor and the founder, chief executive officer and chief investment officer of ARK Invest, the New York-headquartered investment-management firm she launched in 2014 to build actively managed exchange-traded funds around the theme of disruptive innovation. She was born in Los Angeles, the eldest child of Gerald and Mary Duddy, both Irish immigrants; her father had served in the Irish Army before moving to the United States and re-enlisting in the United States Air Force as a radar systems engineer.

Wood graduated from Notre Dame Academy in Los Angeles in 1974 and from the University of Southern California in 1981, summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in finance and economics. Her undergraduate mentor was the supply-side economist Arthur Laffer, who placed her at Capital Group as an assistant economist in 1977. She moved to New York in 1980 to join Jennison Associates, where she spent eighteen years as chief economist, analyst, portfolio manager and managing director, and in 1998 co-founded the hedge fund Tupelo Capital Management with Lulu C. Wang. From 2001 she served twelve years at AllianceBernstein as CIO of global thematic strategies, managing roughly $5 billion. When AllianceBernstein declined her proposal for actively managed innovation-themed ETFs as too risky, she left to found ARK Invest, naming it for the Ark of the Covenant. Her flagship ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) was the top-performing global equity fund of 2020 and the best-performing actively managed U.S. diversified ETF of 2023; Morningstar nonetheless ranked the ARK family of funds the largest “wealth-destroyer” issuer of the decade ending 2023.

Wood belongs to the wider Duddy diaspora abroad — a surname that, in Ireland, concentrates strongly in Donegal, Derry and north Tyrone, though her own family’s specific Irish county of origin is not confirmed in any public source we have located, and we mark it honestly here rather than invent. The Duddy variant sits among the regional offshoots of the wider O’Dubhda line, and the Duddy-Wood family is one of the more visible 20th-century American carriers of the surname. If a relative reading this can place the Duddy line, please get in touch; the Y-DNA project may also help interested male-line Duddys situate themselves.

Wood was selected for the inaugural 2021 Forbes 50 Over 50 cohort. In 2018 she endowed the Duddy Innovation Institute at her old high school, an explicit nod to the surname she carried before marriage. She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida; she was previously married to Robert Wood, who died in 2018, and has three children. Within this directory she sits in two categories at once — CEOs & Entrepreneurs for ARK, and Scientists & Innovators for the thematic research her firm is built on.

Notable work

• Capital Group, assistant economist (1977–1980)
• Jennison Associates, chief economist and managing director (1980–1998)
• Co-founder, Tupelo Capital Management (1998)
• AllianceBernstein, CIO global thematic strategies (2001–2013)
• Founder, CEO and CIO, ARK Invest (2014–present)
• ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK), top-performing global equity fund of 2020
• Forbes 50 Over 50 (2021, inaugural cohort)
• Duddy Innovation Institute, Notre Dame Academy Los Angeles (endowed 2018)

Heritage notes

Family root: Los Angeles, California (Duddy parents emigrated from Ireland — Irish county unconfirmed).

The directory threads Cathie Wood back to the O'Dubhda clan story via the surname-variants reality — the same family carried these spellings as it scattered. See the septs and the diaspora for the wider pattern, or the Clan DNA Project for the genetic connections being mapped now.