The very first of 4 children of Irish immigrants, Ms. Wood expended substantially of her childhood on the shift — her father was a radar technician for the Air Power — prior to the family members settled in Culver City, Calif. She graduated from an all-women Catholic university in 1974, and then attended the University of Southern California, majoring in small business administration.

There she located a mentor in Arthur Laffer, one of the patron saints of supply-facet economics, right after she petitioned to be admitted to 1 of his graduate courses.

“That took a large amount of chutzpah,” Mr. Laffer, 81, stated.

He located Ms. Wooden to be an remarkable student, unwilling, he explained, to abandon any subject matter right up until she recognized it completely.

“I’ve under no circumstances observed anyone so extensive, so very careful and so research-oriented in my lifestyle, which helps make her pretty self-confident,” he claimed.

Ms. Wood’s work ethic and voracious intake of info are recurring themes among the previous co-workers. She often woke perfectly in advance of dawn to get one of the 1st trains to Grand Central Terminal each individual working day, dealing with the virtually two-hour journey from Connecticut as a type of perpetual cram session on rails.

In the times prior to smartphones, tablets and laptop computers, colleagues remembered her lugging baggage laden with investigation experiences into and out of the workplace just about every day.

Sig Segalas co-launched Jennison Associates, a New York income administration store exactly where Ms. Wood worked from the early 1980s until eventually 1998, 1st as an economist and then as an analyst and a fund manager. For quite a few of all those yrs, his business office was upcoming to hers, and he remembers her as generally 1 of the final people to leave the office each individual working day.