Kate Owens is an urban planner and economist with experience in academia, commercial real estate and international development. She started her career as a Junior Professional Associate working on urban development at the World Bank. She then worked at Jones Lang LaSalle on large-scale public private real estate projects and at Wells Fargo on debt financing for commercial real estate developers. She returned to graduate school and wrote her dissertation on the development of private real estate markets in Tanzania. She holds an undergraduate degree in public policy and economics from the University of Chicago and a PhD in urban planning from the University of Michigan.