Keynote Speakers

Keynote Speakers:


Opening Keynote: 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. 


just-aliciaAlicia Glen
Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development
New York City

Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen leads the administration’s efforts to invest in emerging industries across the five boroughs, re-target unsuccessful corporate subsidies, build a new  generation of affordable housing, and help New Yorkers secure good-paying jobs that can support a family.

Ms. Glen began her career as a junior aide to then-Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins. After completing law school, she worked for Brooklyn Legal Services, where she advocated on behalf of low-income tenants and families in need of free legal counsel.

Glen served as the Assistant Commissioner for Housing Finance at the New York City Department of Housing, Preservation and Development from 1998 to 2002, where she was responsible for financing the rehabilitation and construction of thousands of units of market, moderate and low-income units as well as overseeing the City’s supportive housing, tax credit and tax incentive programs. Prior to joining HPD, Ms. Glen was an associate attorney at Fulbright & Jaworski and at Kalkines, Arky, Zall & Bernstein.

Most recently, Glen served as the Head of the Urban Investment Group (UIG) at Goldman Sachs, which provides capital to underserved urban communities. Additionally, she was a member of the Diverse Business Engagement Committee, the GSBank USA Management Committee, and co-led the 10,000 Small Businesses initiative. Under her leadership, UIG spurred more than $5 billion of development across dozens of residential, mixed-use and commercial projects, as well as financed job creation and neighborhood revitalization strategies like the $40mm New York Healthy Food and Healthy Communities Fund. In her role at GS, she helped catalyze projects like NYC’s Citi Bike, development in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and affordable housing projects in Harlem and across the outer boroughs.

Glen was a 2010 David Rockefeller Fellow and currently serves on the boards of the Fund for NYC Public Schools, Enterprise Community Partners, the Bowery Residents Committee, the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, the NYU Institute for Affordable Housing, and is a Trustee of the Citizens Budget Commission.

Glen is a graduate of Amherst College and Columbia Law School.

 

Moderator:

 

sagalyn Lynne Sagalyn
 Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate
Columbia Business School

Professor Sagalyn is the Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate in the Division of Finance and Economics at Columbia Business School, where she is director of the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate and director of the MBA Real Estate Program. She teaches the Real Estate Transactions and the Advanced Seminar in Real Estate electives and co-teaches Real Estate M&A and Restructuring Deal Workshop, a course jointly offered with the Law School. Sagalyn is widely known as an expert in real estate equity securities, public/private development and finance and economic development and urban policy. She has published extensively on a broad range of issues in the fields of real estate, REIT investment, public/private finance, and urban policy and is widely known for her research on public/private partnerships and city building. She is the author of Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon (MIT Press, 2001), an analysis of the politics, policy and economics of one of the city’s largest and longest redevelopment initiatives; Cases in Real Estate Finance and Investment Strategy(ULI, 2000); and co-author of Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (MIT Press, 1989), as well as numerous articles for academic and professional publications. She is currently writing a book on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center with grant support from the Russell Sage Foundation.

Professor Sagalyn’s activities outside academia are diverse. She has been a litigation expert, a consultant to both private firms and public agencies, and a member of the New York City [Board of Education] Chancellor’s Commission on the Capital Plan. She is an experienced executive education instructor. In the business world, she serves on the board of directors of UDR (NYSE:UDR), where she is vice-chairman, and Blackstone Mortgage Trust (NYSE: BXMT), where she chairs the audit committee.

Professor Sagalyn received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980, a Master of City and Regional Planning from Rutgers University in 1971, and was graduated from Cornell University in 1969 with distinction. Prior to her appointment at Columbia Business School, she was on the faculty of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at M.I.T.

 

Closing Keynote: 3:45 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.


gore-onlyAl Gore
Former Vice President
The United States

Former Vice President Al Gore is co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management. He is a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a member of Apple, Inc.’s board of directors. Gore spends the majority of his time as chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a non-profit devoted to solving the climate crisis.

Gore was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, 1978, 1980 and 1982 and the U.S. Senate in 1984 and 1990. He was inaugurated as the forty-fifth Vice President of the United States on January 20, 1993, and served eight years.

He is the author of the bestsellers Earth in the BalanceAn Inconvenient TruthThe Assault on Reason, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, and most recently, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. He is the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary and is the co-recipient, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.”

 

Moderator: 

director-usherBruce Usher
The Elizabeth B. Strickler ’86 and Mark T. Gallogly ’86 Faculty Director of the Social Enterprise Program
Columbia Business School

Bruce Usher is The Elizabeth B. Strickler ’86 and Mark T. Gallogly ’86 Faculty Director of the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business School in New York City, where he teaches MBA students on the intersection of finance, social and environmental issues. Professor Usher is a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. From 2002 to 2009, Usher was CEO of EcoSecurities Group plc, during which time he built it into the world’s largest carbon credit company. Usher led EcoSecurities through an IPO, a secondary public placement and strategic investment, and the sale of the entire company to JP Morgan in December 2009. EcoSecurities developed more than 400 projects in 36 countries, representing approximately 10% of all projects approved by the United Nations under the Kyoto Protocol. Prior to EcoSecurities, Usher was co-founder and CEO of TreasuryConnect LLC, which provided electronic trading solutions to banks and was acquired in 2001. Prior to that, he worked in financial services for twelve years in New York and Tokyo. Usher is an active investor in clean energy businesses. He is on the Board of Community Energy Inc, a US solar project development company, and the United Nations Fund for International Partnerships. He earned an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.

 

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