Olga Kaganova is a senior associate at the Urban Institute, in Washington, D.C. She has been providing technical assistance on real estate reforms and government decentralization in about 15 countries with former centrally planned economies throughout the world-from Eastern and Central Europe to the Middle East to Africa and Asia. Since late 1990s, she has specialized in asset management of government-owned property. Before joining the Urban Institute, she was a founder and managing director of a real estate consulting company in St. Petersburg, Russia. She has lectured and presented at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, UCLA, Wisconsin University in Madison, Penn State University, the Commonwealth University of Virginia, the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, and the National Executive Forum on Public Policy (Canada) and has close to 30 publications on reform issues in professional and academic publications in Eastern Europe, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Finland, and France. She holds the professional designations of the Counselor of Real Estate (CRE) and Fellow of Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (FRICS).
James McKellar is a professor and academic director of the program in real property at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada. Previously, he was director of the Centre for Real Estate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In addition to MIT, he has held faculty appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Calgary. He has lectured at universities in North America, Asia, and Europe. He is a fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, member of the American Real Estate Society, the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, and the Urban Land Institute. He is an honorary life member of the Society of Office and Industrial Realtors. His academic and professional interests continue to focus on international property markets and the real estate industry in a global context.
