Dennis Frenchman

Leventhal Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Department of Urban Studies & Planning and Department of Architecture
Office: MIT, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Bldg. 10-400
tel: 617-253-8847
fax: 617-253-2654
email:dennisf@mit.edu

Dennis Frenchman is the Leventhal Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT, where he is former director of City Design and Development and chair of the Masters in City Planning program. He has taught and practiced extensively in Asia, Europe, and South America and served as External Advisor on urban livability to the President of the World Bank. A registered architect, he is also founding principal of ICON architecture in Boston an international architecture and urban design firm.

Dennis Frenchman’s practice and research focuses on the transformation of cities. He has designed large-scale technology driven developments including Seoul Digital Media City in Korea, the Digital Mile in Zaragoza, Spain, and Media City: UK and is currently planning the Digital Creative City in Mexico. He has a particular interest in the redevelopment of industrial sites and has prepared development plans for the renewal of textile mill towns, canals, rail corridors, steels mills, coal and oil fields, shipyards and ports, including many of national historical significance. Currently he is leading an MIT research effort to develop new models for clean energy urbanization in China, sponsored by the Energy Foundation. He earned his Master of Architecture in Advanced Studies and Masters in City Planning degrees at MIT.

He is the author of articles and books on advanced urban design, including Technological Imagination and the Historic City (2008, Ligouri, with William J. Mitchell, et al). His work has been widely recognized including awards from Progressive Architecture, the American Institute of Architects, and three citations from the American Planning Association for the most outstanding projects in the United States.

Professor Frenchman teaches the the capstone subject in the Real Estate Development: Real Estate Development Studio: Urban Projects.

David Geltner

Faculty Chair, MSRED Program, Center for Real Estate.
Professor of Real Estate Finance & Engineering Systems, DUSP & ESD.
Office: MIT Center for Real Estate, Bldg. 9-325
tel: 617-253-5131
fax: 617-258-6991
email: dgeltner@mit.edu

David Geltner has been at MIT since 2002 where he has held the George Macomber Chair and currently is Professor of Real Estate Finance in the Department of Urban Studies & Planning with a joint appointment in Engineering Systems in MIT’s School of Engineering.

Geltner served as Academic Director of the MIT Center for Real Estate during 2003-08 and is the faculty chair of MIT’s Master of Science in Real Estate Development (MSRED) program. He is the lead author of the most widely-cited real estate investments textbook (“Commercial Real Estate Analysis & Investments”) now in its third edition.

Recipient of the U.S. Pension Real Estate Association’s prestigious Graaskamp Award in 2011 for excellence and influence in real estate investment research, Geltner has served as Academic Advisor to the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF), and as Director of MIT’s Commercial Real Estate Data Laboratory which has developed pioneering commercial property price and investment performance indices based on transactions prices (including the Moody’s/RCA CPPI, the NCREIF-based TBI, and the FTSE-NAREIT PureProperty® Indices). Geltner served from 1999-2012 as the External Academic Member of the Real Estate Investment Committee of the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio (a pension plan sponsor with over $5 billion of directly managed real estate holdings).

Prior to MIT, Geltner was the REEAC Professor of Real Estate in the Finance Department of the College of Business Administration at the University of Cincinnati. He has been teaching graduate level real estate investments and finance since 1989. Geltner received his PhD in 1989 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the Civil Engineering Department in the field of infrastructure finance & economics. He also has degrees in urban studies from Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Michigan. A 2006 study published in Real Estate Economics found Geltner to be the most influential academic real estate writer, based on number of citations during 2000-2004 in top academic real estate journals.

Download Professor Geltner's Curriculum Vitae

Christopher Gordon

Lecturer
MIT Center for Real Estate
Harvard Business School
Office: MIT Center for Real Estate, Bldg. 9-343
email: cmgordon@hbs.edu

Chris Gordon serves as an advisor and manager on complex capital projects worldwide. He works in a hands-on capacity to establish the project strategies, project team, and management process, and then often monitors and/or leads the project to significantly improve the chances for success. He is also a Lecturer at both the Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Real Estate, teaching several courses and writing on complex capital projects.

Example consulting projects include master planning two urban university campuses, development of a new city in Saudi Arabia, leading an effort to redevelop an urban city square into a retail and office complex, development of high rise mixed use retail and residential on a large scale ocean front parcel, repositioning of a landmark urban public library with retail and conference/entertainment space, expansion of the Abu Dhabi airport, and development of an urban resort casino on a brownfields site.

Prior to the establishment of his consulting practice, he served as the Chief Operating Officer for the Allston Development Group, the real estate development arm of Harvard University, from 2005 to 2010. In that role, he oversaw all aspects of of Harvard’s multi-billion dollar expansion in the Allston section of Boston as well as development projects on the historic Cambridge campus. Before stepping into the role of Chief Operating Officer (COO) for the Allston Development Group, Chris was director of Capital Programs and Logan Modernization for the Massachusetts Port Authority. During his decade at Massport, he was responsible for capital programming and project delivery for all capital projects at all Massport facilities, including Logan International Airport (the 13th busiest airport in the world), Hanscom Airfield, Tobin Memorial Bridge, Maritime Terminals on the Port of Boston, and the Worcester Regional Airport. He oversaw the successful completion of the $4.4 billion Logan Modernization Project and as Director of Capital Programs, oversaw a $500 million annual budget.

Chris has served as a board member of the National Research Council’s Board on Infrastructure and the Built Environment, a trustee of the Engineering Center Education Trust, a corresponding editor of the American Society of Civil Engineers Engineering Management Journal, and has been a speaker at numerous conferences. Chris was named the 2001 Person of the Year for the Construction Management Association of America for both the New England region and the country, and was named the 2000 Government Engineer of the Year by the Boston Society of Civil Engineers. In 2003, he received the Manuel Carballo Governor’s Award for Excellence in Public Service. He was Governor Mitt Romney’s appointee as CoChair of the Special Commission on Public Construction Reform that in 2004 resulted in landmark reform of all public construction laws in the Commonwealth. Chris was honored as the recipient of the 2006 New England Achievement Award, presented by the Engineers Week in Boston Committee, a division of The Engineering Center; this annual award recognizes an individual who has demonstrated outstanding achievements, commitment to public service, and support of the engineering profession. Chris served as the Chief Judge for 2010 for the Engineering Excellence Awards for America.

Prior to joining Massport, Chris worked for Cambridge Systematics in the Program Management Group, for Bechtel Corporation in the Civil Division, and for H.E. Bergeron as a project manager.

Chris holds a bachelors degree in civil engineering from the University of Maine and a Masters Degree in Civil Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (research focus on project management and infrastructure delivery methods) and is a registered Professional Engineer in several states. He is married to Cici Gordon, public relations executive; the Gordons reside in Winchester, Massachusetts, with their two children, Tucker, age nineteen, and Tate, age twelve.

Download Christopher Gordon's bio in PDF format

John Kennedy

Lecturer, MIT Center for Real Estate
Office: MIT Center for Real Estate, Bldg. 9-343
email: jkennedy@mit.edu

John Kennedy has been a Lecturer at MIT since 1994, currently at the Center for Real Estate and previously at the Center for Construction Research and Engineering. At MIT he has taught Entrepreneurship and Strategic Planning for the Design, Build, and Real Estate Development segments of the built environment.

As Principal Partner of Kennedy Ventures LLC, a venture company, John works with companies within the built environment to unlock latent business or real estate development opportunities. Previously, John was the founder and President of Kennedy & Rossi. Inc., a design build firm, as well as other businesses within the built environment.

He has served on the boards of various charitable, university, and non-profit organizations, including Life Resources Inc., Mount Saint Joseph’s Academy, Merrimack College Trustee and Real Estate Committee, Epiphany School, The Boston Foundation for Architecture, Lupus Foundation, and the Friends of KwaZulu Natal South Africa.

John holds a M.S. from MIT and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Merrimack College.

W. Tod McGrath

Lecturer
advisoRE, LLC, Boston, MA
Office: MIT Center for Real Estate, Bldg. 9-343
tel: 617-283-2338
fax: 781-749-4886
email: wtod@advisore.com

Tod McGrath is a Lecturer in the Center for Real Estate and is President of advisoRE, LLC. He has taught both real estate finance and spreadsheet analysis at MIT, and currently teaches a two-semester course sequence on the most important business agreements pertaining to commercial real estate development & investment. He has analyzed numerous real estate transactions for developers, investors, banks, insurance companies, tenants, and public agencies. He has served as an expert witness in state and federal courts, and as a member of the Hingham, MA planning and zoning boards. Tod received his BA and MBA from Columbia University.

Peter Roth

Lecturer, Department of Architecture
Office: MIT Center for Real Estate, Bldg. 9-343
tel: 617-253-4373
fax: 617-258-6991
email: peterroth@newatlantic.net

Peter Roth is a Lecturer with a joint appointment in the Center for Real Estate and the Department of Architecture. He is also a developer and real estate consultant with national experience in the area of adaptive re-use and economic development.

Mr. Roth founded New Atlantic Development, a Boston-based development company focused on adaptive re-use and historic preservation, affordable and mixed-income housing development, community economic development, and arts-related uses. He is also involved in the historic preservation advocacy community, and is currently serving as Chairman of the Board of the Boston Preservation Alliance.

Mr. Roth earned Masters degrees in both Architecture and Real Estate Development from MIT. He is a member of the first graduating class of the MIT Center for Real Estate.

Albert Saiz

Daniel Rose Associate Professor of Urban Economics and Real Estate
Office: MIT Center for Real Estate, Bldg 9-323
tel: 617-252-1687
fax: 617-258-6991
email: saiz@mit.edu

An outstanding young urban/housing economist, Saiz pursues research interests in local public finance, real estate economics and urban economic development, with an emphasis on immigration and immigrant location choices, and the impact of skills on earnings and city growth. He will be conducting research and teaching in both the urban planning and real estate programs.

He has done path-breaking work on the determinants of housing supply and the impact of immigrant inflows on housing prices in urban areas, and his work in progress valuing urban amenities and building design promises to open broad areas of collaboration between economists, urban designers and urban developers.

Since 2003, he has been an award-winning assistant professor of real estate in the MBA Core Program at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Housing Economics; a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia; a research associate at the Penn Population Studies Center; a faculty fellow at the Penn Institute for Urban Research; and a research fellow at the Institute for the Analysis of Labor (IZA – Bonn, Germany).

He holds a BA and an MA in economics from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (1995 and1997, respectively) and a PhD in economics from Harvard, 2002.

Download Professor Saiz's Curriculum Vitae

Gloria Schuck

Lecturer, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Office: Bldg. 9-343
email: gschuck@mit.edu

Gloria Schuck’s consulting and research have taken her to over twenty countries in the past three decades. Dr. Schuck has consulted to a wide range of companies in the financial, manufacturing, telecommunications, and retail industries. Her clients include Citibank, Motorola, Procter & Gamble, AT&T, and Verizon. A significant amount of this work was done in global companies as they thought through how to organize and manage to be competitive in the next century. She has also consulted with public sector organizations and utility companies to redefine the regulatory relationship, working to transform it from an adversarial one to partnerships that mutually benefit the shareholders and consumers. She has facilitated large organization change projects. Her consulting work often includes designing, developing, and teaching executive education courses and workshops.

Gloria coaches senior executives to improve individual, team, and organization performance. Her work includes: leadership development, vision and values, strategic decision-making, management style, performance reviews and feedback, succession planning and development of high potential managers, organization change, project planning and implementation, improved work processes, teamwork in the context of real business issues, and time management. She develops, designs, and teaches “Leadership” workshops for senior and middle managers in the private and public sectors. The Government of Mexico asked Gloria to work with its next generation of leaders. Workshops focus on the individual participant and developing his or her “leadership” capabilities.

Gloria’s primary research focus has been on the organizational and educational implications of information technology in the workplace. She is interested in how executives, managers, and organizations learn, and how technology changes the way people perceive their work. She has investigated this area of research in the financial, retail, manufacturing, and real estate industries. In her research and writing she has explore the implications of the widespread use of information technology for hierarchical relationships and structures, particularly for the manager’s role; and the type of organization required to encourage innovation, flexibility, and opportunities to learn at every level.

Gloria has been a Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Sloan School of Management and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning for twenty-eight years. She teaches a graduate course about leadership in the Real Estate Industry; students in this course are offered an opportunity to:

• Develop a deeper understanding of “leadership”;
• Converse with industry leaders about “leadership”, and learn from their insights and experiences;
• Examine their authentic leadership styles;
• Create an action plan to develop leadership capabilities; and
• Craft an individual “leadership point of view”.

Dr. Schuck also taught “Managing in the Real Estate Industry” for sixteen years at MIT’s Center for Real Estate. She designed, developed and taught a graduate course about management and organization theory. The course examined the strategic shift from an industrial to an information economy, focusing on the management skills, organization forms, and change processes needed to be competitive in this century. She introduced students to qualitative research methods and supervised research resulting in the development of more than one hundred management case studies. Dr. Schuck served for two years as the Center’s Director of Education, managing and shaping the Master’s degree program. She also conducted research at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research for two years.

Before coming to MIT, Dr. Schuck was a Research Associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration for six years. She earned her Doctorate and Master’s degrees at Harvard University’s School of Education, with graduate study at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Stanford Business School.

Download Professor Schuck's Curriculum Vitae

Walter Torous

Senior Lecturer
Office: MIT Center for Real Estate, Bldg 9-333
tel: 617-253-4373
fax: 617-258-6991
email: wtorous@mit.edu

Dr. Torous is a Senior Lecturer holding a joint appointment in the Center for Real Estate and the Sloan School of Management. As one of the nation’s top scholars and researchers in real estate finance, he teaches a graduate course in Mortgage Securitization and Other Assets.

Walter is the founding director of the Ziman Center for Real Estate, and Professor Emeritus, at UCLA Anderson. He taught managerial finance, real estate finance, and empirical methods in finance. Walter’s research interests include the pricing of financial instruments (options, future, risky debt, mortgages), the reorganization of financially distressed firms, as well as statistical issues in finance. He previously taught at the University of Michigan and the London Business School. His consulting clients include various banks and financial institutions. Walter holds a BMath. Economics from the University of Waterloo (1976) and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania (1981).

Download Professor Torous's Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Yanni Tsipis

Senior Vice President and Partner, Development Group
Meredith & Grew
Office: MIT Center for Real Estate, Bldg. 9-343
tel: 617-330-8151
fax: 617-330-8093
email: ytsipis@mit.edu

Yanni specializes in the permitting and development of large-scale urban projects. His recently completed projects include the 61-unit Grandview Condominiums in downtown Boston, the 361-unit Nashua Street Residences at North Station, and the Promenade, a 220-unit historic rehabilitation project in downtown Providence.

Yanni is active in a number of civic activities in Boston and is a member of the Boston Landmarks Commission. He serves on the Board of Overseers of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Board of Directors of Preservation Massachusetts, WalkBoston, the Bostonian Society, and the Boston Society of Civil Engineers. A Boston native and resident, Yanni holds degrees in Urban Studies and Planning and Civil Engineering from MIT and is the author of several books about the history of Boston's transportation infrastructure.

William C. Wheaton

Professor, MIT Department of Economics
Office: Bldg. E52-252B
tel: 617-253-1723
fax: 617-258-6991
email: wheaton@mit.edu

William Wheaton is a Professor holding a joint appointment in the Departments of Economics and Urban Studies and Planning. An authority on regional economics, Bill is a principal in a consulting firm that provides market analyses for development companies active in the market for commercial space.

A member of the MIT faculty since 1972, Professor Wheaton helped to develop the field of urban economics by pioneering the theory of how land, location, and housing markets jointly operate. He also specializes in the problems of urban infrastructure and local government finance. He has written numerous articles in scholarly journals throughout the world, and is a co-author of Urban Economics and Real Estate Markets, the first text book to cover both real estate applications and economics.

In the last few years, Professor Wheaton has been actively applying economic research to the real estate industry. He helped organize the MIT Center for Real Estate, and teaches the program's core course in Real Estate Economics. He was the first economist to apply econometric methods to the forecasting of real estate markets, and is a principal in Torto Wheaton Research, a globally-recognized real estate consulting firm that works with the real estate industry to better understand the fluctuations and trends of the market.

Professor Wheaton received a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Over the years he has worked with many US governmental agencies, as well as the World Bank and the United Nations. Closer to home, he has been a member of the planning commissions in each of the several towns where he has lived.

• Professor Wheaton's Department of Economics website

Dennis P. Yeskey

Thomas G. Eastman Chair, MIT Center for Real Estate
Office: 9-343
tel: 617-253-3988
fax: 617-258-6991
email: dyeskey@mit.edu

Dennis Yeskey is the 7th Thomas G. Eastman Chair of the MIT Center for Real Estate. As Chairperson, Dennis will lend his leadership and extensive network to promote the Center’s mission nationally and internationally. He will also work closely with the Center’s Industry Partners to enhance and reshape the value we bring to our Partners, as well as expand our membership base. As a proven practice builder, Dennis will provide strategic oversight for new initiatives—such as Alumni Partnership and Teaching Affiliate programs—as well as for the Center’s existing Professional Development Institute.

As a National Partner of Deloitte, Dennis represented many of the leading real estate investors and developers, both across the U.S. and globally. In 1995, he was recruited by Deloitte’s Chairman to head the New York Office’s Real Estate Services Profit Center and was responsible for the restructuring and developing Real Estate into one of the leading Practices in this arena. In 2000, he was promoted to Group Managing Partner of Deloitte’s Real Estate, Investment Management, Private Equity and Insurance based Practices in the New York Office. As part of this position, Dennis directed the Firm’s Financial Services marketing and eminence building activities. In addition, he played a key real estate leadership role for Deloitte’s National and Global Financial Services and was extremely active in the European and Asian Practices, having both lived and worked in these regions.

Prior to Deloitte, from 1986 to 1995, Dennis developed and led a successful real estate practice as a partner at Kenneth Leventhal & Company, the premier real estate restructuring firm in the United States at the time. He began his career at A.T. Kearney and PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he specialized in business strategy and operational assignments across the USA, as well as in Europe and Japan. Previously, he worked at two engineering firms that specialized in solving difficult design and construction issues.

Dennis holds an MBA in finance from Columbia University. He also holds both bachelors and master’s degrees in civil engineering from the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, where he was presented the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2007. He is an active member of The Real Estate Roundtable and the Urban Land Institute, for which he became ULI Foundation Governor in 2008. As a published author, Dennis is also a frequent speaker and contributor for industry-leading forums and organizations throughout the U.S. and Europe. They include IMN, RealShare, AFIRE, IRETO, CPN and Cityscape.