SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Jerry Nickelsburg joined the UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and The Anderson Forecast in 2006. Since 2017 he has been the Director of The Anderson Forecast. He teaches economics in the MBA program with a focus on Asian economies. As the Director of The Anderson Forecast he plays a key role in the economic modeling and forecasting of the National, and California economies. He has conducted research in the areas of labor economics, industrial organization, statistics, and international monetary economics, focusing on the development of new data and the application of economic theory and statistical methods to policy issues. His current academic research is on specific skills, structural unemployment, and on energy efficiency in transportation. He is a regular presenter at Economic Conferences and is cited in the national media including the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Reuters. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1980 specializing in monetary economics and econometrics. He was formerly a professor of Economics at the University of Southern California and has held executive positions with McDonnell Douglas, FlightSafety International, and FlightSafety Boeing during a fifteen-year span in the aviation business. He also held a position with the Federal Reserve Board of Governors developing forecasting tools, and has advised banks, investors and financial institutions.
From 2000 to 2006, he was the Managing Principal of Deep Blue Economics, a consulting firm he founded. He has been the recipient of the Korda Fellowship, USC Outstanding Teacher, India Chamber of Commerce Jubilee Lecturer, and he is a Fulbright Scholar. He has published over 100 scholarly and popular articles on monetary economics, economic forecasting and analysis, labor economics, and industrial organization and he is the author of two books on monetary economics and exchange rates.
William Yu joined the UCLA Anderson Forecast in 2011 as an economist where he focuses on the economic modeling, forecasting and Los Angeles economy. He also conducts research and forecasts on China’s economy, and its relationship with the U.S. economy. His research interests include a wide range of economic and financial issues, such as time series econometrics, data analytics, stock, bond, real estate, and commodity price dynamics, human capital, and innovation. Currently, he teaches business forecasting and data science courses at UCLA Anderson and UCLA Extension. He also serves as a faculty advisor for the Applied Management Research Program at UCLA Anderson. He has published over a dozen research articles in Journal of Forecasting, International Journal of Forecasting, Journal of International Money and Finance, etc. He also published op-ed articles in Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. He developed the City Human Capital Index and the Los Angeles City Employment Estimate. He has been cited in the local, national and overseas media frequently including Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Time, Bloomberg, CBS Money Watch, Al Jazeera, U-T San Diego, LA Daily News, LA Daily Breeze, Straits Times, NBC, ABC, CNBC, CNN, and NPR, as well as various Chinese and Korean media. Yu has been invited as a speaker for various events, including the annual Woo K. Greater China Business Conference and National Association for Business Economics.
Yu received his bachelor’s degree in finance from National Taiwan University in 1995 and was an analyst in Fubon Financial Holding in Taipei from 1997 to 2000. In 2006, he received his Ph.D. degree in economics from the University of Washington where he was also an economics instructor and won two distinguished teaching awards. In 2006, he worked for the Frank Russell Investment Group for Treasury and corporate yields modeling and forecasting. From 2006 to 2011, he served as an assistant and an associate professor of economics at Winona State University where he taught courses including forecasting methods, managerial economics, international economics, and macroeconomics.
Professor Coulson received his BS in Economics from the University of California, Riverside, and his PhD from UC San Diego where he studied under the direction of Nobel Laureate Robert Engle. He has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia and New York, the University of Auckland, and elsewhere, and is published widely in real estate, urban economics, housing economics and related fields. Most recently, he has made research contributions in the areas of the impact of sports franchises on economic development, the hybrid investment characteristics of REITs, and the development of a repeat-rent index that corrects previous biases in the estimation of investment returns. In 2009 he was named a Fellow of the Weimer School for Advanced Real Estate Studies. From 2006 through 2014 Ed was co-editor of Real Estate Economics, the journal of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association (AREUEA), and is a member of the editorial boards of other leading journals in the field. In January 2015 he became co-editor of Journal of Regional Science. He was recently elected by the membership of AREUEA to serve as the organization’s president for 2016.
Professor Coulson was previously the Professor of Economics and Director of the Lied Institute for Real Estate Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Prior to UNLV, he was Professor of Economics and King Faculty Fellow in Real Estate at The Pennsylvania State University, where he had been on the faculty since 1984 and received numerous outstanding teaching awards.
Douglas G. Duncan is Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at Fannie Mae where he is responsible for forecasts and analyses of the economy and the housing and mortgage markets. Duncan also oversees strategic research regarding the potential impact of external factors on the housing industry. He leads the House Price Forecast Working Group reporting to the Finance Committee. Under his leadership, Fannie Mae’s Economic & Strategic Research Group (ESR) won the NABE Outlook Award, presented annually for the most accurate GDP and Treasury note yield forecasts, in both 2015 and 2016 – the first recipient in the award's history to capture the honor two years in a row. In addition, ESR was awarded by Pulsenomics for best home price forecast.
Named one of Bloomberg/BusinessWeek's 50 Most Powerful People in Real Estate, Duncan is Fannie Mae's source for information and analyses on demographics and the external business and economic environment; the implications of changes in economic activity on the company's strategy and execution; and for forecasting overall housing, economic, and mortgage market activity.
Prior to joining Fannie Mae, Duncan was Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association. His experience also includes work on the Financial Institutions Project at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and service as a LEGIS Fellow and staff member with the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs for Congressman Bill McCollum in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Duncan received his Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Texas A&M University and his B.S. and M.S. in Agricultural Economics from North Dakota State University.
I have been in the commercial real estate business since 1988 employed as a financial analyst, investment sales agent, acquisition/disposition officer and CEO. Throughout my career, I have bought, sold, brokered, auctioned, and/or asset managed over $10B in commercial real estate assets across the nation in every product type, in addition to helping raise $1.25B for a development fund. I had a lot of fun doing it too. I enjoyed the people, the challenges, and the entire experience.
But in every case, I worked for a firm that was either a public company or owned by private equity where the goal was not necessarily to provide the best service or product, but to grow the bottom line. Most decisions were for short term economics and typically did not do any favors for the employees, the asset, nor the client, and that is where I want Topside to make a difference.
Topside Real Estate will be a client and employee focused service provider reinvesting the majority of its revenue back into its people and resources. We want to help our clients maximize the value and efficiency of their real estate holdings, and we want our associates to maximize their earnings and growth potential. Life is too short. We want to create an environment that is service oriented, supportive, successful and have fun while doing it.
Recognized for her superior client service and attention to detail, Amanda Donson enjoys facilitating complex real estate transactions on behalf of her clients and closing challenging deals. Amanda represents a wide variety of clients including developers, homebuilders, private investors, institutional investors, and global technology companies in their acquisition, disposition, development and leasing of industrial, retail, office and multifamily assets throughout the United States.
From the early stages of drafting letters of intent to negotiating purchase agreements, analyzing due diligence and managing the close of escrow, Amanda is a trusted advisor working collaboratively with her clients to achieve successful outcomes. With respect to her leasing work, she drafts and negotiates industrial, retail and office leases, including build-to-suit leases, on behalf of landlords and tenants. In addition, Amanda drafts and negotiates CC&Rs, easement agreements, and development agreements in connection with her ground-up development work of shopping centers and residential subdivisions.
While in law school, Amanda was a repeat recipient of the prestigious CALI Excellence for the Future Award for legal research, writing and advocacy and honored for her commitment to serving the community through her pro bono legal work. She serves on the firm's Community Outreach and Pro Bono Committees, and has recently represented a non-profit in the acquisition of a commercial building to serve as their new headquarters.
Kwaku Gyabaah leads front-end activities for Clark Construction Group’s Western Region, from project identification and pursuit through cost estimating, purchasing, and design phase management. Throughout his tenure at Clark, Kwaku has played a critical role in project development efforts on noteworthy projects across the country including the Chase Center, Salesforce Tower, National Museum of African American History & Culture, Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton, The Forum Renovation, Long Beach Courthouse Building P3, and LAX Central Utility Plant.
Kwaku is passionate about advancing local, small, and diverse business enterprises and is a leader in Clark Construction’s Strategic Partnership Program, which provides core construction management and business skills training for small and minority-owned businesses in an executive-MBA style format.
Kwaku earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Howard University and a master in business administration in general management and international real estate development from the University of California, Irvine.
Kwaku serves on the board of the Los Angeles Business Council (LABC) and is active with Habitat for Humanity’s Los Angeles Chapter. Kwaku was recognized as a Top Young Professional in California by Engineering-News Record in 2018 and as one of Los Angeles’s Most Influential African Americans Under 40 by the Los Angeles Wave Newspaper in 2013.
Barbara Perrier has been with CBRE for 31 years and is a leading investment broker specializing in industrial and land sales. Barbara has been among the firm’s Colbert Coldwell Circle, an elite group that is comprised of the top 3% of producers in the entire company and was appointed the elite title of Vice Chairman, the highest title a producer can achieve within CBRE and a title shared by few professionals nationally. Her most recent achievement was receiving the William H. McCarthy Award, CBRE’s highest recognizing one high-producing professional annually for materially impacting our culture, driving excellence and unselfishly leading by example. Barbara and her team executed 80 deals in 2019 with a total transaction value in excess of $16.4 billion. Mrs. Perrier is one of the leading investment professionals in the region and was awarded Broker of the Year for 2019 by the San Fernando Business Journal and Top Industrial Sale for 2019 by the Los Angeles Business Journal, with her partner Darla Longo.
A key player within CBRE’s Institutional Group (IG), she has facilitated many complex, multi-market dispositions including over 30,000 acres of land sales, major sales and portfolios.
Barbara and her partner Darla Longo are part of National Partners—a group of leading CBRE IG Professionals across the United States www.cbre.com/np. The National Partners transacted $25 billion in 2019.
Christopher Tipre serves as Principal for Trammell Crow Company’s Southern California Business Unit in Newport Beach, California. In this capacity, he works alongside capital partners, brokers, tenant representatives and prospective investors for the sourcing, analysis, and execution of new acquisitions and development projects. Chris is responsible for land and deal sourcing, financial analysis, due diligence, entitlements, debt and equity capital relationships, development coordination, and project leasing. Chris performs detailed and customized underwriting for all office and industrial acquisitions and developments, prepares comprehensive investment summaries with asset and market level analyses for internal investment committee and institutional investment partners, and collaborates with the development managers on strategic issues throughout the design, permitting and construction processes.
Prior to joining TCC, while earning his MBA, Chris interned as an Asset Manager with LBA Realty, assisting in the management and valuation of a $4B portfolio of office and industrial assets. Before returning to graduate school, Chris worked as a Retail Commercial Real Estate Specialist with Terranomics Retail Services in California’s San Francisco Bay Area as a Tenant and Landlord Representative. As a Tenant Representative, Chris provided local market expertise to Fortune 500 companies and regional tenants to establish and implement strategic expansion plans, select locations, and negotiate leases in prime retail space. As a Landlord Representative, he managed the leasing of over 2M SF of power center and grocery anchored shopping center space across the nine Bay Area counties.