Featured Speakers

Josh Childress

Chief Executive Officer
Landspire Group

Josh Childress has over a decade of experience as a real estate investor. He is the co-founder and CEO of Landspire Group, a Southern California-based real estate investment firm seeking to revitalize communities that were once defined by small businesses, livable wage jobs, and a thriving middle class. Childress is dedicated to advancing his commitment to creating lasting positive change through community (re)development.

Before embarking on his career in real estate, Josh was a professional basketball player in the NBA, Greece, Australia, and Japan. In 2010, he founded the Childress Family Foundation, an organization focused on providing mentorship and resources to high school and collegiate athletes. Driven by a desire to support higher educational opportunities, he established the Childress Athletic Scholarship, the first-ever summer studies scholarship at Stanford University.

Childress holds his B.A. in sociology from Stanford University. He serves on the Social Impact Council for RevOZ Capital and is an advisory board member for Metasys Technologies and BoostSport.AI.

Justin Davis

Chief Operating Officer
Landspire Group

As COO and co-founder of LandSpire, Justin Davis brings years of experience chartering strategic capital deployment initiatives and consulting with medium-size businesses seeking to improve bottom and double-bottom-line performance.

Prior to his career in business and social impact, Davis played professional basketball overseas for five years, where he gained significant exposure to European sport leagues. He holds an M.S. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and received his B.A. in Communications from Stanford University.

Paolo Bocchini, Ph.D.

Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Lehigh University

Paolo Bocchini is a professor and director of graduate programs in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Lehigh University. His research is related to applying probabilistic concepts, computational mechanics, operational research, and other analytical and numerical tools to civil engineering problems. His main focus areas are catastrophe modeling, resilience assessment, and optimal allocation of resources for the design, retrofit, and recovery of infrastructure systems subjected to extreme events.

Bocchini is also the founder and director of the Center for Catastrophe Modeling and Resilience, serves as associate editor for the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering, leads large interdisciplinary teams, and was elected fellow of the ASCE Structural Engineering Institute.

Before joining Lehigh he was a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer in Italy and the U.S. He received his Ph.D. in structural mechanics and his Laurea degree (B.Sc. + M.Sc.) in civil engineering from the University of Bologna.

Stephanie Johnson, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Finance
Rice University

Stephanie Johnson is an assistant professor of finance at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. Her research focuses on household finance and empirical macroeconomics.

Johnson holds a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University and a Bachelor's in economics with honors from the University of Tasmania. Before starting her graduate studies Stephanie was an analyst at the Reserve Bank of Australia in the Financial Stability Department.

Jamie Padgett, Ph.D.

Stanley C. Moore Professor of Engineering
Chair, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Faculty Director, GSP@Rice

Jamie Padgett is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Engineering and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her research focuses on applying probabilistic methods for infrastructure risk assessment, including the subsequent quantification of resilience and sustainability. Her work emphasizes structural portfolios such as regional portfolios of bridges or oil storage tanks exposed to multiple hazards, including earthquakes, hurricanes, or aging and deterioration.

Among other projects, Padgett currently serves in leadership roles within several large national or regional research efforts including the NIST Center of Excellence for Community Disaster Resilience at Colorado State University, the NSF NHERI Cyberinfrastructure “DesignSafe-CI” at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Severe Storm Prediction Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center at Rice University.

Padgett is the founding Chair of the ASCE/SEI technical committee on Multiple Hazard Mitigation and is an active member of several national technical committees within ASCE and TRB. She serves on editorial boards for the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering, Natural Hazards Review, and Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure.

Stephan Sain, Ph.D.

Senior Director, Geospatial and Data Sciences
Jupiter Intelligence

Stephan Sain is a senior principal data scientist and senior director of geospatial and data sciences at Jupiter Intelligence. Jupiter provides data and analytics services to better predict and manage risks from weather and sea level rise, storm intensification and changing temperatures caused by medium- to long-term climate change.

Sain is an experienced data science leader and applied statistician who has long worked at the intersection of climate research and applied statistics, including a focus on spatial methods for large datasets, extremes, uncertainty quantification, and climate risk analytics. From 2006 to 2014, he was the head of the Geophysical Statistics Project and a scientist at the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO.

Sain is a fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and is a past recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and the Environment. Steve serves on the steering committee for the ASA’s newly formed Caucus of Industry Representatives, is an affiliate faculty in the University of Colorado’s Department of Applied Mathematics and is a member of the advisory board for the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) at the University of Chicago. He has a Ph.D. in statistics and a B.A. in mathematical sciences and statistics from Rice University.

Omar H. Thowfeek

Chief Operating Officer
Hines

Omar Thowfeek is chief operating officer of Hines Global Income Trust. He also serves as senior managing director, fund management at Hines. He leads the underwriting and capital deployment efforts for all real estate acquisitions and is responsible for the execution of Hines Global Income Trust’s business plan, operations and portfolio strategy. Thowfeek joined the firm in 2014, and during his tenure has underwritten over $20 billion in global real estate across multiple asset classes throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Frederi Viens, Ph.D.

Professor of Statistics
Rice University

Frederi Viens is a professor in the Department of Statistics at Rice University. He pursues a long-standing personal research agenda in probability theory, stochastic processes, mathematical statistics, and applied probability for insurance mathematics and quantitative finance. Over the past 15 years, he has developed a robust applied statistics research program. Using the power of computational Bayesian statistics, he collaborates on a number of significant projects in climate science, agricultural economics, hydrology, development economics, nuclear physics, human health management, and agronomy.

Viens serves on the editorial board of the Annals of Finance and is a senior member of the Risk Modeling Group for Land Core. He is an associate editor for several prestigious journals in probability, statistics, and finance. He holds a master's degree in mathematics from the University of California at Irvine, a maîtrise de mathématiques pures from the Université de Paris 7, France and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Irvine.

Paul Wasserman

Managing Director
KKR

Paul Wasserman oversees the portfolio and asset management activities for KKR’s $65+bn AUM real estate business. Wasserman led KKR Real Estate’s Portfolio Management and Valuation Committees for all Equity and Credit products as well as directing their data and ESG strategies.

Prior to joining KKR, Wasserman was with Sculptor Capital Management in New York where he was head of asset management, responsible for establishing and running asset-level operational oversight of the firm's real estate funds and spearheading certain acquisition opportunities. Previously, he was an acquisition and asset management professional at Time Equities, Inc., where he acquired and managed a diverse portfolio of office industrial, retail, residential, and development assets in the U.S. and Canada. Wasserman has also held real estate positions with Workspeed, Jones Lang LaSalle, and the NYC Department of Design and Construction. He is a Council Member of the Urban Land Institute, a Board Member of Eight Million Stories and received his B.A. with honors from Trinity College.

Matthew Werner, CFA

Managing Director, REIT Strategies
Chilton Capital Management

Matt Werner is a managing director/portfolio manager who leads the Chilton REIT Team. Werner performs analysis, conducts property tours, and meets with REIT management teams to assemble a portfolio that seeks to outperform the benchmark, net of all fees and expenses. His team is responsible for managing separately managed accounts for institutions and high-net-worth individuals, as well as a public 40 Act Fund. Werner also interfaces with clients and prospects to communicate how this proven strategy will continue to build wealth so that clients can achieve their financial goals.

Before arriving at Chilton, Werner worked on the investment team at Salient Partners, where he gained valuable knowledge of analyzing and assessing real estate fund managers for fund of funds (FOF) and worked on the Salient REIT Team.

Werner holds a CFA charter and is a member of the Houston CFA Society, CFA Institute, and the National Association of Real Estate Trusts (NAREIT). He has been quoted in numerous national publications including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Barron’s, Financial Times, Investor’s Business Daily, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, and Kiplinger’s.

Werner holds a B.S. degree in finance from Boston College. He lives in Houston with his wife, Rebecca, and children, Graham and Claire. He enjoys coaching his kid’s soccer and baseball teams, as well as playing golf, skiing, and hiking.