Dr. Sam Chandan

Dr. Sam Chandan is the Founding Director of the Chen Institute for Global Real Estate Finance at the NYU Stern School of Business, where he leads the school’s real estate programs and centers in real estate finance, climate change and the sustainable built environment, data science and artificial intelligence, and global real estate markets. The Chen Institue is consistently ranked amongst the top real estate MBA programs in the United States and globally. Prior to joining the faculty of Stern’s Finance Department, Dr. Chandan was the Silverstein Chair and dean of the NYU SPS Schack Institute. He is also founder and non-executive chairman of Chandan Economics, an economic advisory and data science firm serving the institutional real estate industry, and an independent advisor to TruAmerica, with $16 billion in assets under management. Prior to founding Chandan Economics, he was Chief Economist at Real Capital Analytics and at REIS. Among his diversity and inclusion initiatives, Dr. Chandan is Chair of the Real Estate Pride Council, representing LGBTQ+ professionals in institutional real estate finance and investment, and a member of the Real Estate Executive Council (REEC). In 2017, he founded the National Symposium of Women in Real Estate (WIRE). Dr. Chandan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, the Royal Society for Public Health, and the Real Estate Research Institute, and a contributing member of the American Society for Microbiology. He holds an honorary appointment as the Economist Laureate of the Real Estate Lenders Association and has served on the real estate advisory council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. His commentary has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, CNBC, Bloomberg, and elsewhere. Among his current research initiatives, he is the lead author of the World Economic Forum’s Framework for the Future of Real Estate. Dr. Chandan received his PhD in Applied Economics from the Wharton School and was a Doctoral Scholar in the Economics Department at Princeton University. He served previously on the faculties of the Wharton School and the Economics Department at Dartmouth College. In addition to the doctorate, he holds a post-doctoral public health degree in epidemiology, with a focus on infectious diseases, from Yale University and graduate degrees in economics and electrical engineering from Penn.