UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate

John Cotter

Darren Aiello, Research Fellow for the Ziman Center's UCLA Gilbert Program in Real Estate, Finance, and Urban Economics, is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the BYU Marriott School of Management. His research interests include Real Estate Finance, Securitization, and Empirical Corporate Finance.

Prior to academia Darren spent eight years in various analytical and managerial roles at one of the largest issuers and master servicers of private label mortgage backed securities in the United States.

Darren received a BS in Business Administration and a BA in Economics, both from Pepperdine University, as well as an MBA in Finance from the UCLA Anderson School of Management prior to receiving his PhD in Finance, also from UCLA Anderson.

Darren and his wife Mandy have triplet sons (James, Peter, and John) and two daughters (Charlotte and Madison).

Edward Kung, Research Fellow for the Ziman Center's UCLA Gilbert Program in Real Estate, Finance, and Urban Economics, is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the David Nazarian College of Business and Economics at California State University Northridge. Prior to CSUN, he taught economics for six years as an Assistant Professor of Economics at UCLA. Edward’s research interests include housing, real estate, mortgages, urban economics, and the economics of digitization.

Edward has a Ph.D. in Economics from Duke University, an M.A. in Economics from Duke University, and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Chandler Lutz, Research Fellow for the Ziman Center's UCLA Gilbert Program in Real Estate, Finance, and Urban Economics, works at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He combines theory, econometircs, and empirical techniques to study housing economics, monetary policy, and macroeconomics. Lutz's research interests include housing economics, financial economics, macroeconomics and monetary policy.

Chandler has received numerous grants and awards related to his research and teaching. Before joining the Securities and Exchange Commission, he was an Associate Professor of Economics at Copenhagen Business School.

He earned his PhD from the University of California, Riverside, and a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and economics at the University of Redlands. At Redlands, Chandler played four years of collegiate tennis.  He also studied abroad and played tennis at University College London (UCL).  Chandler was born and raised in Denver, Colorado.

Nitzan Tzur-Ilan, Research Fellow for the Ziman Center's UCLA Gilbert Program in Real Estate, Finance, and Urban Economics, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Her research interests include Household Finance, Real Estate, and Financial Regulation.

Before joining the Kellogg School of Management, Nitzan spent six years as a researcher at the Research Department at the Central Bank of Israel, focusing on the financial stability of households, macroprudential policies, and stress tests models. Nitzan was also a Lecturer of Real-Estate Finance in a course for undergraduate students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for five years.

Nitzan has a Ph.D. in Finance, an M.B.A. in Finance, and a BA in Economics, all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Sagit Azary-Viesel is a postdoctoral scholar at the Ziman Center's UCLA Gilbert Program in Real Estate, Finance, and Urban Economics since January 2021. She has completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University. Her thesis entitled "The Institutional Political Economy of the Middle Class in Developed Countries" is a comparative study of the middle class's welfare in OECD countries. Among the multiple large data sets, she used in her dissertation are the U.S. PSID data, the Household Expenditure Survey for Israel, and EU-SILC data for the European countries. Her main areas of interest are Labor market policy, Urban economic, and Economic mobility.

Sagit served as a researcher at the Taub Center, the Shoresh Institute, the Israel Democracy Institute and the Boris Mints Institute for Strategic Policy Solutions for Global Challenges at Tel Aviv University -- four of the leading social policy research institutes in Israel -- and has acquired proven expertise in using quantitative methods in the analysis of big data sets.

For over ten years, Sagit has been teaching at various higher education institutions in Israel: Tel Aviv University, Sapir college and the Open University. She has thus acquired significant experience in teaching the following courses: Principles of Economics, Economic Policy in Israel, Public Economics, and Social Aspects of Public Policy. Sagit has been given the top Rector award for Excellence in Teaching at the Tel Aviv University three years in a row.