2020 Board of Governors in Da Nang – Biographic Information

AmCham Vietnam Board of Governors in Da Nang

Chris Vanloon

CHAIRMAN, General Director, Riverside Tower Commercial Center

Chris Vanloon first came to Vietnam in 1998 when the Furama Resort Danang opened, the first five-star resort in the country. After leaving Furama, he moved on to Property Management in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, working as a consultant and later becoming the Head of Property Management in Hanoi for Chesterton Petty (later merged and rebranded as Savills). He built up a portfolio of projects for Chesterton, from high-end luxury apartment buildings to mixed-use commercial properties. He also worked heavily in development advisory, reviewing land usage plans, and collaborating with project owners to assist in design layout and functionality of several buildings in the Hanoi skyline today.

Chris stepped away from property development and became the Director of Northern Operations for Destination Asia. In this role, he oversaw the daily operations of high-end luxury travel and incentive business, and spent a great deal of time travelling to Europe, the United States, and Canada, to promote Vietnam as a destination for foreign travellers.

Returning to property, Chris helped start New Peaks JSC, where he was the Managing Director overseeing the establishment of the company and its direction in areas of property development and advisory. At the same time, Chris helped found the property services company Viethomecare in Da Nang. Then, Chris became the General Director for Indochina Riverside Towers and Riverside Tower Commercial Center in Da Nang.

Chris has a background in Management and Marketing from Boston College. He served in the United States Navy. Chris’ diverse background in Vietnam and passion to develop Da Nang allows him to contribute unique strengths to AmCham Vietnam and its members.

Michael Edward Kelly

VICE CHAIR, General Director, BRG Hospitality

Michael Kelly joined BRG Hospitality in 2021 as its General Director. BRG is the premier hospitality company in Vietnam, operating and developing numerous local and International brand hotels, resorts, restaurants, and golf courses throughout Vietnam.

Prior to joining BRG Hospitality, Michael served for the past five years as the Executive Chairman of The Board of Directors and CEO of the Ho Tram Project Company. HTP wholly owns and operates The Grand Ho Tram Strip (the most awarded integrated resort in Vietnam) and the Bluffs Golf Course (ranked among the top 100 courses in the World) in Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province.

Michael has over 35 years of experience in the hospitality and casino industry in both the private and public sectors, and has served as the CEO, COO, President, CFO and CMO of some of the largest hospitality companies in the United States.

He earned a B.S. in Business Administration from Villanova University, in Pennsylvania.

Dr. Kasia Weina

VICE CHAIR, Co-Founder, Director, Evergreen Labs

Dr. Kasia Weina has extensive experience and education in research and project management. She has a bachelor’s in biology and chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, an MS in pharmaceutical drug discovery from the University College London, and a PhD in Molecular Biology (cancer and stem cell research) from the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Kasia has worked in laboratories in different countries, including the Great Lakes Water Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison (NIH), a biotech firm in the Cambridge area, and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany. After her PhD and a Postdoc period, she pivoted her career to sustainable development and social entrepreneurship in Asia and frontier markets. In 2015 she co-founded her first startup focused on designing and producing eco-friendly products in Hong Kong, before moving to Vietnam in early 2016 to co-found Evergreen Labs.

As the director of Evergreen Labs (a solution-driven social and environmental project, development organization, and social venture builder), Kasia oversees daily operations, including idea validation and innovation and technology within the experimentation branch, while applying a scientific approach to sustainable business development. In the past five years, she has co-developed two social business spinoffs and grown the advisory branch. To date, Evergreen Labs has worked and scaled innovations in Vietnam, Myanmar, Lao PDR, Indonesia, and Thailand. Kasia focuses on: solid waste management, agriculture value chain, and sustainability management. She has managed projects for a variety of notable clients including ADB, MBI, IDH, GIZ and IUCN.

Kasia has published 10 papers in international journals, co-authored work with UNDP, and has been featured in South China Morning Post. In 2020 she received the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Graduate of the Last Decade Award. Kasia still supports labs in Germany with research paper publications in peer-reviewed journals and has supported research projects at VN-UK University of Danang, Vietnam.

Craig Meadows

SECRETARY, Director, DDP Projects

Craig Meadows received his education in architecture from Rice University in Houston, Texas. He first came to Vietnam in 1995, bringing skills to assist with the masterplan and setup of P&G’s first facility in Vietnam. He also worked on one of the country’s first golf course residential communities. After almost 3 years in HCMC, he left Vietnam for further project training throughout the world. He went into field Project Management, helping to design and manage portions of industry facilities such as IBM (Vermont) and Kodak Headquarters (China), as well as hospitality resorts such as Four Seasons in the Bahamas, and Camana Bay in Cayman Island. He also was involved in the setup and construction of the new US Embassy compound in Jamaica, both as a field architect and general liaison with OBO for their security protocol measures.

Craig returned to Vietnam in 2009 as the Design Manager for the new Hyatt Regency Resort in Danang, working directly for Indochina Capital. After being involved with the project for a few years for design management, he then became the General Director of the resort. In this role, he was responsible for the overall completion of their additional condominiums and the initial stages of operations and residential management, in addition to working as the liaison between Indochina Capital and Hyatt directly.

In 2014, Craig joined forces with a business partner as a co-director of DDP Projects Vietnam, Ltd. They specialize in masterplanning, design and PM services for the development of large scale tourism, entertainment and hospitality projects, helping to design and develop projects throughout Vietnam, such as BaNa Hills, Asia Park, etc. Their combination of international design expertise and local Vietnamese architects enables the DDP team to deliver projects with international characteristics and standards, that are also sympathetic to the Vietnamese and Asian cultural requirements.

Craig has now lived in Danang since 2009, making it his new home, and thus has developed a passion for ensuring the continued development of Danang and the central coast of Vietnam in general.

Luke Treloar

TREASURER, Managing Director, Strategy Group, National Head of Healthcare and Life Science, KPMG Vietnam

Luke is a career KPMG strategy consultant with extensive Emerging and Frontier Market experience. Throughout his consulting career, he has been responsible for designing, developing, and implementing high-profile, profitable, and mission-critical strategy and operations management solutions for global Fortune 500 clients. This has included market entry and expansion strategies, acquisition target analysis, operational turnarounds, government interaction strategies, regulatory and risk management, restructurings, and market exits. He is currently the Managing Director Strategy Consulting for KPMG Vietnam and Cambodia, and runs the firm’s Healthcare and Life Sciences practice

Michael Beckman

Managing Partner, EY Law Vietnam

Michael Beckman currently leads the newly launched law firm EY Indochina, a fast growing team of fifteen corporate lawyers based in Ho Chi Minh City. EY Law Global has over 4,000 lawyers in eighty five offices around the world, with intentions to expand quickly throughout ASEAN. Michael will head this expansion process in Indochina.

Michael has over twenty years of experience in corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate law. Prior to joining EY, Michael worked as a corporate attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, London, and Los Angeles, as well as Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. He focused on international corporate bankruptcy, securities, and M&A work. He is a member of the bar of New York and California and is a licensed foreign lawyer in Vietnam.

Outside of law, Michael worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in their pharmaceutical practice group and managed his own hedge funds for a decade.

Michael graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University, received his M.A. from Princeton University and his J.D. from Yale Law School. He also studied at both Cambridge University in the UK and Georg-August University in Germany.

Liviu Leșe

General Manager, Universal Alloy Corporation Vietnam

Liviu Leșe, a Romanian national, is the General Manager of the Universal Alloy Corporation, Vietnam (UACV), a subsidiary of Montana Tech Components AG. UACV had the groundbreaking ceremony for its Da Nang facility in March 2019 and has been in operation since January 2020. UACV provides the aviation and aerospace industry with aluminum alloy components.

Under Liviu’s leadership, UACV has already achieved several important milestones. The project has been highly valued by Da Nang authorities for its completion commitments and being ahead of the scheduled targets. Da Nang authorities have highlighted the success of UACV’s project in order to attract more international high-technology manufacturing investment into Da Nang.

With a background in engineering, Liviu started his career in Electrolux as a mechanical engineer and later began working for the UAC company starting in 2013. Over seven years, he gradually gained experience, skills, and knowledge in leadership, program management, operation management, and quality management in the aviation and aerospace industry.

Mary Tarnowka

Executive Director of AmCham Vietnam

[email protected]

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