Banco Popular de Puerto Rico

Ramin Sedehi is a leader of Berkeley Research Group�s Higher Education practice. His areas of engagement are in the strategic, academic, and restructuring and performance improvement dimensions of universities and colleges, including related entities such as academic medical centers and research organizations. Mr. Sedehi�s particular focus in consulting centers on enabling organizational leaders to lead institutions through transformative change by engaging holistic and adaptive strategies.Mr. Sedehi has been a highly successful strategic leader and has more than 20 years of experience leading institutions through times of great change. He has built robust, responsive, and sustainable organizations centered on service, expertise, and effectiveness. In his decades of leadership at several world-class institutions, he enacted multiple strategic plans; led restructuring efforts and created long-term performance improvement plans to restore fiscal health and seed investments; constructed budgeting processes and large-scale systems to improve decision making; and worked with faculty, academic leaders, and boards to build trust and enhance collaboration to innovate and lead in an environment of great complexity.Mr. Sedehi served for 12 years as the vice dean (CFO and COO) at the University of Pennsylvania�s School of Arts and Sciences, a $500 million enterprise, one of the largest schools at Penn, and a leader in liberal arts education and research. He led the school through its most extensive physical, organizational, and financial transformation in the last 35 years. During Mr. Sedehi�s tenure, the university gained in national reputation by moving from 12th to 4th place in the U.S. News rankings; the school reversed longstanding deficits and doubled its financial and physical resources, along with substantial improvement in its academic indicators.As an award-winning faculty member at Penn�s Fels Institute of Government, Mr. Sedehi regularly taught graduate courses in�Financial Management and Budgeting�and in�Leadership and Strategy for Complex Organizations.Before Penn, Mr. Sedehi served in financial and organizational leadership positions at the University of California, San Francisco and at UCSF Stanford Health Care. He was a key member of the financial leadership team responsible for the merger with Stanford Hospital System. He worked with CEOs, CFOs, and deans of the various institutions involved in the merger and, in particular, led the development of the common funds flow arrangement between UCSF Stanford Health Care and the two medical schools.�

Emilie R. Ninan is the Managing Partner of the firm's Wilmington office and the partner responsible for the public finance practice in Delaware.Ms. Ninan works with governmental, quasi-governmental, and private entities, including 501(c)(3) institutions, to obtain lower-cost capital financing through the issuance of tax-exempt bonds. She has served as bond counsel, underwriter's counsel, borrower's counsel, issuer's counsel, or trustee's counsel on a variety of municipal bond financings, including general obligation, revenue, conduit, utility system, health care, industrial development, single-family and multifamily housing, cultural institution, and educational facility bond transactions. In such capacity, Ms. Ninan has advised every major bond issuer (including all three counties), municipality, hospital, and higher educational facility in the State of Delaware.In addition to her public finance practice, Ms. Ninan advises on uniform commercial code matters and delivers formal legal opinions in connection with financing transactions. She also represents corporate, banking, and nonprofit clients in connection with loan documentation, contract negotiation, project finance, and other commercial transactions.In February 2013, Ms. Ninan was part of the delegation that traveled to India on a trade mission led by Delaware Governor Jack Markell. Ms. Ninan was profiled by Law360 in its February 12, 2014, edition, in an article titled "Female Powerbrokers Q&A: Ballard Spahr's Emilie Ninan."

Jeff Schoenberg is an advisor to The J.B. and M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation, a Chicago-based philanthropy. The Foundation is a private family foundation deeply committed to the pursuit of social justice and to shaping innovative and effective strategies for solving society�s most challenging problems. Mr. Schoenberg principally advises members of the Pritzker family on grant making for The Children�s Initiative, a project of the J.B. and M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation, which seeks to enhance the early learning capabilities of infants and toddlers, with a special focus on at-risk children. As part of his philanthropic portfolio for the Pritzker family, Mr. Schoenberg conceived The Cambodia Tribunal Monitor web site, considered the primary source for information on the historic international genocide trial of senior Khmer Rouge leaders. Previously, Jeff Schoenberg was a Democratic member of the Illinois State Senate, representing the 9th district from 2003 to 2013. He earlier served for six terms in the Illinois House of Representatives, first elected to that position in 1990.

Lisa A. Smith has over 20 years of experience as a municipal investment banker and financial advisor focusing on issuers in California. Ms. Smith started her career at First Interstate Bank working in their Public Finance and Corporate Banking Divisions. After attending business school, she ventured back into the municipal finance field working as an investment banker in the Los Angeles offices of Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette and Stone & Youngberg. In 2002, she co-founded and served as the day to day managing partner of financial advisory firm Gardner, Underwood & Bacon LLC. In January 2011, Ms. Smith negotiated the sale of Gardner, Underwood & Bacon LLC to Loop Capital Markets. She recently served as a Managing Director and Co-Head of the Western Region for Loop and was responsible for the managing and marketing of the firm’s resources on the west coast.Throughout her career, Ms. Smith has managed over $20 billion in transactions, structured numerous innovative financings and provided complex technical and analytical expertise for a variety of issuers. She has utilized virtually every type of debt instrument in assisting clients in the structuring of new money and refunding issues including general obligation, pension obligation bonds, tax and revenue anticipation notes, revenue, lease backed financings, multi-family housing bonds and tax allocation bonds. Ms. Smith has worked with a variety of issuers including the State of California, the cities of Chicago, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland and Phoenix, as well as Alameda County, Cook County, Los Angeles County, San Bernardino County, Los Angeles Unified School District, Chicago Public Schools, UC Regents, California State University and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.Ms. Smith has a B.A. from Amherst College in Economics and a MBA in Finance from UCLA, Anderson School of Management. She holds Series 52, 53 and 63 licenses as well as is a 2008 graduate of Leadership LA. In January 2012, Ms. Smith was honored by her peers with the 2012 “She’s Our Hero” Award given by the national organization of Women in Public Finance.In addition to her professional career, she currently serves on the Los Angeles Advisory Board of the Posse Foundation, is a Finance Committee Member and Board Member for the Campaign for College Opportunity, is the Technology Chair for Women in Public Finance.�

Kelsi Spurgeon is a Principal of Columbia Capital Management, having joined the firm in 2004. She advises clients in both financial and investment advisory activities. She has extensive experience in financial modeling and quantitative analysis.Prior to joining Columbia Capital Management, Ms. Spurgeon was a financial advisor for a national financial advisory firm where she developed financial models and conducted cash flow analysis for a variety of debt transactions. In South Dakota she worked for the Department of Revenue on the development and progress of the National Streamlined Sales Tax Project.Among her accomplishments, Ms. Spurgeon developed a financial model of a complex multi-district economic development program involving multiple series of bonds with different repayment securities, one dozen different sources of revenue and an extremely complex and inter-related series of expenditures from those various revenues. Her models also include analysis of future potential retirement liabilities for a large city in Kansas related to the impacts of its contractual obligations for certain employee groups on its payments to the state retirement system and structuring many different types of general obligation and revenue bond issues. She also authored a cost/benefit model for a community demonstrating the net fiscal impact of property tax abatements on city, county and school district governments.Ms. Spurgeon holds a BS in Business Administration in Economics from the University of South Dakota. Her undergraduate thesis consisted of creating a model capable of examining sub-national tax structures and their impact on corporate returns. She presented this research at several national conferences. Ms. Spurgeon has completed one year of coursework toward a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Kansas.Ms. Spurgeon recently advised the State of Missouri on two large refunding transactions of State general obligation bonds producing more than $33.6 million in combined savings. Ms. Spurgeon developed the plan of finance for each transaction, identifying the opportunity for economic and budgetary savings, working with State Department of Administration Staff to obtain gubernatorial approval of the transactions, and subsequently advising on the successful pricing and closing of each transaction. Columbia serves as the State�s on-going financial advisor.

Suzanne Mayes, chair of Cozen O’Connor’s Public & Project Finance Practice Group and vice chair of the Business Law Department, focuses her practice on municipal and project finance, with an emphasis on economic development, transportation, public works, education, senior living and housing. She serves as bond counsel, underwriter’s counsel, borrower’s counsel and disclosure counsel to a range of public, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Suzanne is a founding member of the board of directors of Ladies First, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing educational and networking opportunities to female public finance professionals in the mid-Atlantic region.

Monika Suarez is Senior Vice President, Municipal Finance Manager for Western Alliance Public Finance. Ms. Suarez, a public finance professional for 18 years, specializes in debt and financial management for local governments. She has been involved with hundreds of financings for local governments and not-for-profit (NFP) organizations as an independent financial advisor, rating agency analyst, investment banker and issuer.Ms. Suarez joined Western Alliance in 2013 to expand the bank’s California municipal and NFP business, and has helped grow the portfolio to more than $1 billion of municipal and NFP direct-placement bonds. Prior to joining Western Alliance, Ms. Suarez had primary responsibility for planning future debt insurances and developing innovative financing solutions for Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She serves as Vice President–Programming for Women in Public Finance, Los Angeles Chapter. Ms. Suarez graduated from the University of Arizona with a B.A. in Political Science and earned an M.P.A. with a concentration in State and Local Public Finance from The George Washington University.

Barbara Byron is a registered Landscape Architect with has a Master’s Degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia and is an AICP.Between 1986 and 2007, Ms. Byron was the Director of the Fairfax County, Virginia, Zoning Evaluation Division in the Department of Planning and Zoning.� In that position, she was responsible for direction and oversight of the 400 to 500 rezoning, special exception, special permit, and variance applications that are presented to and decided by the Board of Supervisors, Planning Commission and Board of Zoning Appeals each year.�In 2007, she assumed responsibility for a new office that was created in Fairfax County – the Office of Community Revitalization.� In that capacity, she heads an office charged with the revitalization of the County’s older commercial and mixed use areas, including leading the County’s efforts to redevelop Tysons from an auto-oriented edge city into a pedestrian oriented urban environment.� In addition, she has a primary role in the County’s public/private partnerships including the formulation of Community Development Authorities and Tax Increment Financing initiatives, including leading the County’s efforts on the Mosaic at Merrifield development.��Prior to her experience in FairfaxCounty, Ms. Byron was an associate at EDAW, Inc., an international landscape architecture and planning firm.

Laura Parrott is a Senior Director and heads TIAA-CREF’s Investment Grade Private Placements Team.� She is based in North Carolina and oversees all new investment activities related to the firm’s $15 billion investment-grade corporate debt private placement portfolio.� She joined the TIAA-CREF organization in 2005 and had held several roles, including: private placement originations, private equity portfolio management and portfolio research.� She has more than 15 years of industry experience. Prior to joining TIAA-CREF, Mrs. Parrott worked at JPMorgan where she was an Assistant Vice President and held various roles in Private Equity, International Equities, and Private Wealth.� Mrs. Parrott earned a B.S. in business administration from Wake Forest University and an M.B.A. from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.