Alessandro Pagani is a portfolio manager and head of the mortgage and structured finance team at Loomis, Sayles & Company. He leads the group in developing investment strategies for mortgage pass-through, asset-backed, residential and commercial mortgage-backed securities across all fixed income products. Alessandro also co-manages the firm’s securitized investment strategies. With 26 years of investment industry experience, Alessandro joined Loomis Sayles in 2008 from Cambridge Place Investment Management, a specialty manager of credit sensitive structured securities, where he was co-head of global research and credit. He was also a director of asset-backed securities research at Banc One Capital Markets. Alessandro earned a doctoral degree in economics and commerce from the University of Brescia in Italy

an Anderson is the agency MBS strategist for the mortgage and structured finance team at Loomis, Sayles & Company where he is responsible for developing agency MBS research and relative value recommendations across all fixed income products. He is the lead portfolio manager for the dedicated agency MBS strategies and a co-agency MBS portfolio manager for the Loomis Sayles Core Plus Bond Fund. Ian joined Loomis Sayles in 2011 from Fannie Mae, where he held several positions over his 11 year tenure. Most recently, he was a senior portfolio manager for Fannie Mae’s investment portfolio, developing and implementing relative value alpha strategies for the agency MBS, CMO, CMBS, reverser mortgage and hybrid sub-portfolios. Prior to this, Ian was responsible for agency CMO structured book, conducting hedging of assets and assisting researchers to develop accurate prepayment and term structure models. He began as a financial analyst and later became a senior securities analyst and assisted traders with inquiries into various model risk analytics and forecasts in various asset classes, helped design and implement a short horizon portfolio tracking system, compared internal model prepayment speeds and risk analytics, and designed and produced return attribution reports for the portfolio.

Barath Sankaran is a member of the mortgage and structured finance team at Loomis, Sayles & Company. He is a co-portfolio manager for the dedicated agency MBS strategies and a co-agency MBS portfolio manager for the Loomis Sayles Core Plus Bond Fund. Additionally, Barath guides other product teams at the firm in the optimal sector allocation and portfolio implementation of agency MBS. Barath joined Loomis Sayles in 2009 as an analyst in the mortgage and structured finance group, where he initially focused on non-agency RMBS and gradually expanded his role to agency MBS. Since 2011, Barath has been dedicated to the agency MBS effort with the goal of developing best-in-class investment capabilities. He was instrumental in creating the firm's proprietary prepayment model and has led the creation of a fundamentally-driven relative value approach to investing in specified MBS pools. In 2018, Barath was promoted to portfolio manager. Prior to Loomis Sayles, he held multiple roles at Johnson & Johnson, where he was a member of the Information Management Leadership Development Program, a Six Sigma dashboard architect and later a business relationship lead for the consumer products division. Barath earned a BS from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is fluent in German.

Steve LaPlante is a portfolio manager and securitized strategist on the mortgage and structured finance team at Loomis, Sayles & Company. He is a securitized strategist for the Full Discretion team, working directly with portfolio managers to structure the allocation to the sector. He is also a co-portfolio manager and senior analyst on the mortgage and structured finance team, responsible for co-managing the investment grade securitized credit and opportunistic securitized credit strategies. Steve joined Loomis Sayles in 2017 as a mortgage and structured finance analyst and has 14 years of investment industry experience. Previously, he was a senior analyst at Manulife, responsible for the mortgage credit sector including nonagency RMBS and agency risk transfer securities. Prior to this, Steve was a senior analyst at Income Research and Management, serving as the primary analyst in commercial mortgage credit, including CMBS and agency CMBS securities. Before this, he was at White Mountains Advisors as a portfolio analyst, maintaining portfolio level analytics, evaluating pricing models, and monitoring exposures across the firm’s portfolios, which included ABS, CMBS, RMBS holdings as well as Agency, Sovereign and Corporate securities. Steve earned a BS from Union College and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University.

Jennifer Thomas is a co-portfolio manager on the mortgage and structured finance team at Loomis, Sayles & Company, where she co-manages the investment grade securitized credit and opportunistic securitized credit strategies. She is also a senior analyst, specializing in ABS with a focus on consumer ABS. Jennifer is responsible for generating relative value trade ideas to help enhance portfolios and achieve investment objectives, and collaborating on structured product-related initiatives with client services and marketing. In addition, she has also supported the credit and research efforts in CMBS. Jennifer joined Loomis Sayles in 2007 and has 22 years of investment industry experience.