Our Team

Mark Cafferty

President & CEO

As president and chief executive officer of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation (EDC), Mark Cafferty sits at the center of a unique partnership of business, trade, community, and education leaders who have reinvented the region’s economic development agenda.

Cafferty has spent the last three decades designing and managing systems to support career advancement and economic opportunity for American workers. His leadership and service at EDC have positioned San Diego as a pillar of the global economy, while also establishing ‘inclusion’ as the foundation for the organization’s mission, goals, and work.

He previously served as CEO of the San Diego Workforce Partnership and deputy executive director for the Boston Private Industry Council—where he led the nation’s largest summer youth employment program in the summer of 2000.

Cafferty serves on numerous boards and committees, including the President’s Council at California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), and the board of directors and governance committee for Curebound—a San Diego-based nonprofit organization dedicated to curing cancer in our lifetime.

A Boston native who now considers San Diego home, he earned a BA in marketing and communications from Assumption University, and his advanced certification in Performance Measurement and Non-Profit Management from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Cafferty was also selected as a Center for Social Innovation Fellow at Stanford Graduate School of Business and received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from CSUSM.

He resides in San Diego’s Point Loma neighborhood with his amazing wife Charlene Kakimoto and their teenage sons Kai and Quinn. Charlene is a dermatologist and former lieutenant commander with the United States Navy.

Nikia Clarke

Chief Strategy Officer, EDC; Exec. Director, WTCSD

Dr. Nikia Clarke is Chief Strategy Officer of San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation (EDC), and Executive Director of World Trade Center San Diego (WTCSD), an EDC affiliate.

She leads strategy and program development for the organization, and oversees its economic development, research, talent and global engagement priorities. Clarke’s background is in global trade and investment strategy, and she has two decades of experience in global and local economic development in the academic, private, and non-profit sectors.

She is a former appointee to the National Investment Advisory Council, a collection of senior leaders that advises the administration on FDI policy and strategy, and is founder and former Director of OUCAN, an international network of emerging market industry leaders, policy makers and researchers. She is also a professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and serves on the boards of SDSU’s International Business Program and Innovation District, Lifeline Community Services, the San Diego Innovation Council, the San Diego & Imperial Small Business Development Center Network, and Port Maritime Advisory. Previously, she advised the San Diego STEM Pathways Community and World Design Capital 2024.

She holds a BA from Loyola Marymount University, an MPhil from Cambridge University, and a PhD from Oxford University.