Meet the Nancy and Douglas Abbey Master of Real Estate Development + Design Class of 2021
 |
Romi Bhatia
Coming back to UC Berkeley after 20 years, Romi is excited to pursue his Master of Real Estate Development + Design degree.
Romi grew up in San Jose, CA and graduated from Cal (’00), where he majored in Political Science and Economics in his undergraduate studies. As a recipient of the John Gardner Fellowship, Romi left for Washington D.C. to start a career in public service with a focus on microfinance. |
 |
Mark Bluth
Mark Bluth received his B.S. in Economics with a major in Philosophy from Santa Clara University in 2014. After graduation he worked in corporate real estate for Oracle and then Square Inc, focusing on portfolio strategy, project management, and site planning. His work centered him on the West Coast between Portland, Oregon and the Bay Area, although his impact extended across North America. Each of his projects integrated financial feasibility, company objectives and values, and employee experience to ultimately enhance business activity. |
 |
Rami Cardenas
Rami Cardenas joins the Berkeley MRED+D program from Tijuana, Mexico. Rami has more than 6 years’ experience managing his family-owned and -operated real estate development company, a firm with more than 30+ years of experience developing and holding projects ranging from middle-income family housing, to convenience shopping centers and light industrial and multifamily developments in the Baja California region. |
 |
George H. Casey III
Prior to joining UC Berkeley’s MRED+D program, George was an attorney at Morrison & Foerster LLP. George’s practice focused on counseling clients in real estate transactions, including acquisitions, dispositions, entitlements, leasing, joint ventures, and development. Prior to his experience with Morrison & Foerster LLP, George was an attorney at Hoge Fenton, where his practice involved commercial real estate acquisitions and dispositions. |
 |
Max Connor
Prior to joining UC Berkeley’s MRED+D program, Max served as a Business and Wealth Management Account Manager for Armanino LLP in Los Angeles. He managed financial affairs for many of Armanino’s high-net-worth clients, which included both the structuring and monitoring of each of his clients' personal and business ventures. His day-to-day tasks included everything from tax planning and cash flow management to financial reporting and advising his clients on their future investment endeavors. |
 |
Paul Davis
Paul Davis is currently an Acquisitions and Asset Manager at Lakeside Investment Company in Oakland, CA. His role is to source, analyze, and perform due diligence on the purchase of commercial real estate in the Bay Area. He also works on day-to-day asset management tasks, such as litigation support, and joint venture waterfall distributions. He previously interned for Link Senior Development, where he worked on land acquisitions, entitlements, and market research for senior living facilities in Southern California. Through these roles, he has gained experience underwriting multifamily projects while assisting in communication with architects, local municipalities, brokers, and key development partners. He is well-versed in real estate finance and pro forma modeling for development opportunities. |
 |
Elvins Derisma
Elvins Derisma joins Berkeley’s MRED+D program with more than six years of professional experience. Elvins was born and raised in Florida. He began his professional career as a United States Army Soldier with the 101st Airborne Division, Air Assault. Ironically enough, having always had a passion for real estate and architecture, Elvins was stationed near Nashville, Tennessee—and was able to experience the benefits of the revitalization of the urban core—which shaped the city’s skyline and stimulated his curiosity while served on active duty. Shortly thereafter, upon leaving the military after four years of honorable service, Elvins began working for RMC Property Group, a full-service commercial real estate firm based in Tampa, Florida, within their development department. While at RMC Property Group, Elvins became a member of both the Urban Land Institute’s Young Leaders Group and the International Council of Shopping Centers. |
 |
Yasamin Enshaeian
Born and raised in Iran, Yasamin moved to the US to pursue her degree in architecture. After residing in Southern California and attending community college, she went on to get her Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture from the University of Cincinnati. During her studies, she successfully managed to gain experience in a variety of architecture and planning firms, where her work ranged from airport design to high-rise development and commercial spaces. |
 |
Davey Friedman-Hong
Originally from Seattle, Davey is joining the Abbey MRED+D program after six years at WeWork, where he was an early employee and one of the company's first leasing managers. Davey built out WeWork's sales organization in the West from the ground up to over 50 locations across 10 cities, growing revenue in the region from zero to over $250M annually. Davey also spent time in China, helping to build WeWork's sales apparatus in Shanghai and Beijing. |
 |
Stuart Glenn
Stuart Glenn joins UC Berkeley’s Master of Real Estate Development + Design program with an impressive 15-year career in the real estate development industry. Currently, he serves as the Senior Development Manager at Apple, Inc., where he is involved in all forms of the retail development process including asset management, real estate finance, lease and contract negotiations, and construction management throughout the North America and Asian Pacific territories. Stuart’s work focuses on luxury retail projects ranging from Apple’s IFC flagship store in Hong Kong to its Union Square flagship store in San Francisco, CA. Before joining Apple, Stuart worked as a Project Manager at Clark Construction Group, leading the procurement department for the North America Western Region. This experience provided Stuart with the foundation and necessary skills to pilot successful projects for both Clark Construction and Apple. |
 |
Erik Harnisch
Originally from Chicago, Erik primarily grew up in Southern California and attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where he obtained his Bachelor of Science in Quantitative Economics and his minor in Statistics.
Upon graduation, he moved to San Francisco and joined Polaris Pacific, a condominium brokerage and marketing company focusing on West Coast urban markets. As a research manager, Erik has advised on all scales of residential development in the pre-construction stage, ranging from in-fill developments to master-planned communities, while providing revenue forecasts, sub-market analysis, and efficient land use and product mix. |
 |
Edward Horne
Edward joins UC Berkeley’s MRED+D with more than 10 years of professional and entrepreneurial real estate experience.
By employing modular and traditional construction methods, Edward intends to help redevelop urban missing middle neighborhoods that provide affordable, design-driven housing options for low- and moderate-income families. Berkeley’s MRED+D gives him the opportunity to combine development theory with hands-on learning to gain a deeper interdisciplinary understanding of how development can positively impact society and the environment. |
 |
Edwina Jean-Louis
Edwina Jean-Louis immigrated to Philadelphia from Haiti at 8 years old with her family. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture from the Pennsylvania State University. After graduating, Edwina worked for a series of prestigious architecture firms in New York and San Francisco. She has worked on a variety of project types: educational, retail, senior living, multi-family, healthcare, and hospitality. She has had a varied career working as an architect and as an interior designer for two years. Currently, she is a project manager/project architect with over 13 years of experience. She is a licensed architect in New York and California, and LEED AP accredited. |
 |
Nick Linda
Born and raised in San Francisco, Nick Linda has been interested in the unique opportunities and challenges cities present since, as a child, he played pretend with his own imagined sustainable city in his home’s garden. His specific interest in urban issues led him to graduate from UC Davis with a bachelor’s degree in Sustainable Environmental Design in 2019. Nick’s first job out of college was as a Project Coordinator for the architecture firm Gensler, where he assisted project managers with a variety of large-scale projects in the Bay Area. |
 |
Brian Litke
Prior to pursuing his Masters in Real Estate Development + Design at UC Berkeley, Brian Litke spent the past decade in a variety of financial and operational roles, most recently as the Director of Strategic Finance at Sunrun – the largest residential solar company in the United States. At Sunrun, he was responsible for the financial planning and forecasting for all of the G&A, Marketing and R&D departments, as well as corporate financial reporting. Before joining Sunrun, Brian worked in several leadership roles at Maxar, an integrated aerospace company, primarily in Finance but also in Supply Chain and a rotation as the Chief of Staff to the Division’s President. In addition to developing an appreciation for complex manufacturing projects, he worked on several special assignments, including due diligence and an ERP system implementation. Brian began his career at Deloitte in the firm’s assurance practice, serving the Clean Tech and Financial Services markets, and is a licensed CPA. He obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Santa Clara with a BS in Accounting. |
 |
Rachel McCown
Rachel McCown is an MRED+D student in the class of 2021 cohort. Prior to enrolling at UC Berkeley, Rachel worked in architecture at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill-Chicago. Her two years at SOM primarily focused on large-scale residential, office and retail projects in the United States and China, assisting in all aspects of the design and technical coordination process. Other work experience includes time at HDR-Boston in healthcare design and BVH-Omaha in religious architecture. |
 |
Michaelyn Miyagishima
Michaelyn Miyagishima joins Berkeley’s Master of Real Estate Development + Design after five years of living and working in the Washington, D.C. metro area. While in Washington, D.C., Michaelyn worked in various research and operations roles at Avison Young, a global commercial real estate firm. Most recently, she was the Operations Manager for the Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia, and Suburban Maryland offices, focused on facilities management, finance and accounting, human resource functions, and administration across the region. Michaelyn was also actively involved in the company’s corporate social responsibility platform, committed to building out sustainability and philanthropic initiatives. In this role, Michaelyn strategized corporate governance in order to promote health and wellness, financial success, and positive environmental impacts for Avison Young’s employees and clients. |
 |
Kristian Mizes-Tan
Kristian grew up in New Orleans and attended Tulane University, where he received a Master of Architecture way back when. He is oddly experienced at beginning a new university experience during turbulent and unexpected circumstances, given that Hurricane Katina made landfall a few days after moving into his freshman dorm, thus causing, among other hurdles, the fall semester to be cancelled.
Since graduating, Kristian has worked in architecture offices on the east, gulf and west coasts for firms ranging from 3 to 150 people, and on wide-ranging projects, including a hospital, an 11-foot-wide spec house, a winery, condo towers, and a classroom-less elementary school in Silicon Valley. This nomadic trajectory has given him a wonderfully broad exposure to an array of peoples and places and has also shown him the strengths and limits of traditional architectural practice. |
 |
Willie Mort
Willie Mort received a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy & Economics with a minor in Consumer Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. After graduation, Willie worked for a hospitality development firm in Los Angeles called Pouring With Heart Hospitality (fka 213 Hospitality). At PWH Hospitality, Willie assisted in the day to day operations of 26 venues throughout Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin and Denver. Additionally, Willie worked on the development of a handful of newly-constructed hospitality concepts, from site selection to permitting to the build-out of the venues. |
 |
Somaia Omar
Somaia Omar joins Berkeley’s MRED+D program with more than a decade of professional experience in various investments, including Real Estate Development in the MENA (Middle East and Northern Africa) region.
Having graduated with Highest Honors in Integrated Marketing Communication and a double minor in Art and Business Administration, Somaia's career took off on a fast-track, covering the creative worlds of strategy, integrated marketing, design creation, management and board member of companies with more than $100 million turnover. |
 |
Farnaz Omidvar
Farnaz Omidvar was born and raised in Iran, where she received her bachelor’s degree in Urban Planning and Design from the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. She worked as an urban designer on different scale projects, such as the master plan design of 34000 ac. Iran International Airport City. The challenge of negotiating between the designer's objectives and the developer's constraints sparked her interest in better understanding the developers' viewpoint and incentivized her to join a development team as an assistant project manager prior to immigrating to the United States. Before joining UC Berkeley, she worked as an assistant property manager at A&P Management in San Diego, where she managed the company’s west coast portfolio. |
 |
Lucy Phillips
Lucy is a Bay Area native with 6 years of professional experience transacting in San Francisco’s residential and commercial markets. After graduating from Scripps College in Claremont, CA with a BA in Politics, Lucy returned to San Francisco and joined one of the city’s top producing residential sales team at Sotheby’s International Realty, where she helped navigate almost $300,000,000 in sales volume and more than seventy transactions of single-family homes, condos, and multi-unit buildings. Eager to learn the commercial side of the business, Lucy later joined Raise Commercial Real Estate (fka HelloOffice), a technology-forward brokerage representing high-growth tenants. By the end of the year, the ten-person team owned 20% of the market share in San Francisco and opened a second office in Los Angeles. |
 |
Jaclyn Rea
Jackie brings more than a decade of professional experience as a licensed architect on a variety of project types, including healthcare, higher education, hospitality and sports facilities, to the MRED+D cohort. Her success managing large, complex projects, from 30,000-seat stadiums to 1 million-square-foot hospitals, attests to her problem-solving skills and diligence while engaging the entire team to achieve project goals. She has worked as a project architect and manager at the offices of RTKL Associates in Dallas, and CO Architects and Gensler, both in Los Angeles. |
 |
Ifeatu Samuel
Originally from Southern California, Ifeatu ventured north after high school behind the redwood curtain to Humboldt State University, where she earned her bachelor's degree in Environmental Science and Management with a concentration in Planning and Policy.
After graduating, Ifeatu joined the local government sector working as a Land Use Planner for the City of Arcata and Calaveras County, California. She worked on specific area planning, subdivision entitlements, CEQA environmental review, zoning amendments and land use code compliance. During this time she also began taking Real Estate Development and Land Use Law courses at UC Davis. |
 |
Matthew Smith
Matthew Smith is an architectural designer and LEED AP from Greater Boston with more than a decade of experience working on commercial, residential, and community-focused projects. He also has extensive graduate-level teaching experience in architecture history, urban economics, and urban studies.
Matt is actively involved in his community as a volunteer at the local food pantry and a member of its advisory committee. He also uses his graphic design skills for vote-by-mail initiatives and other voting rights issues. He is passionate about social justice, inclusionary policies, and equitable design. |
 |
Tyler Yuzhou Wang
Tyler Yuzhou Wang received a bachelor of architecture degree from Northeastern University in 2017 and recently graduated (2019) with a master of architecture degree from the University of Sydney. During his studies, he gained expertise in various architecture skills, such as operating innovative, industry-leading design software including Revit, Rhino, and Grasshopper. During Tyler’s most recent internship at HDR Inc., his skills secured a bid from Ball Aerospace in Denver, Colorado, for the design of its new laboratory. |
Members of the Class of 2021 not pictured above: Rokelle Sun.