Tamara Gishri Perry is the Director of Strategic Initiatives and Industry Cluster Development, and joined the LAEDC in 2015. Tamara provides thought leadership, strategic direction and drive the execution of the LAEDC’s capacity building efforts in key traded industries, including for example:

• Building external support for our capacity building efforts;

• Strengthening LA County’s key industries by better aligning and deploying our region’s multitude of economic, education, networking, physical and R&D assets; and

• Working in close partnership with all of the LAEDC’s internal program-delivery departments to develop and implement tactics to help fill gaps (e.g., capital, physical spaces) along the “idea to export” value chains associated with these key industries.

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Tamara has a lot of experience developing, launching and successfully implementing sizeable programs and initiatives. Most recently, she served as the Senior Manager at the Center for Sustainable Energy (CSE), a non-profit organization whose mission is to drive clean energy innovation, solutions and technologies.  At CSE, Tamara led industry development efforts in the Los Angeles region, as well as overseeing the Department of Energy’s (DOE) California Rooftop Solar Challenge for the State of California. Tamara has extensive capacity building and partnership development experience within the LA region’s emerging clean technology sectors, e.g., clean fuels and renewable energy. She worked for Los Angeles City Mayor Villaraigosa’s Office of Economic Development Policy as a clean technology liaison, where she helped launch the CleanTech Los Angeles organization; the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP), where she helped manage the DOE’s Smart Grid Demonstration program, along with administering to DWP’s external university partnerships; and the Los Angeles Planning Department. Tamara was also a bilingual teacher at an elementary school and adult education program in Barcelona, Spain. She received her Masters of Urban Planning from the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California and a Bachelors of Business Administration from Emory University.