Sonal Desai, Ph.D. is the executive vice president and chief investment officer for Franklin Templeton Fixed Income. Dr. Desai is responsible for overseeing Franklin's Municipal, Corporate Credit, Floating Rate, Multisector, Global (including Emerging Markets), and Money Market Fixed Income teams.
She is also a portfolio manager for a number of strategies, including Core Plus, Strategic Income, Total Return, Low Duration, Global Absolute Return, and Global Aggregate Fixed Income. She is a member of Franklin Resources' Executive Committee, a small group of the company's top leaders responsible for shaping the firm's overall strategy. In addition, she serves on the firm's Management and Investment Committees.
Prior to her current role, she served as a portfolio manager with Dr. Michael Hasenstab for the flagship Templeton Global Bond and Templeton Global Total Return strategies, as well as director of research for Templeton Global Macro, shaping the team's research agenda of in-depth global macroeconomic analysis covering thematic topics, regional and country analyses, and interest rate, currency and sovereign credit market outlooks. She started her career as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh, and then worked for over six years at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC. Following this, she joined the private financial sector and worked for about five years as director and senior economist for Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in London.
Dr. Desai joined Franklin Templeton in 2009 from Thames River Capital in London. Dr. Desai holds a bachelor of arts in economics from Delhi University and a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University. She was part of the Templeton Global Bond Fund portfolio management team named Morningstar's Fixed Income Manager of the Year in Canada in 2013. In addition, she has been named to Barron's annual list of the 100 Most Influential Women in US Finance every year since it was introduced in 2020.