CREC Leadership Team
Profiles of the national Leadership Team of the Cornell Real Estate Council
CREC Leadership Team
The current CREC Leadership Team includes a handful of Regional Leaders running Regional Chapters, a 3-member Board of Directors (which we expect to expand in the near term), and a CREC Steering Committee, a group of fewer than a dozen alumni who are doing the heavy lifting to launch CREC as an official not-for-profit organization, and launch this website. We are looking to expand our Leadership Team; please scroll down to see how you can get involved.
Board of Directors
David Rupert
Mr. Rupert serves as President of Griffin Capital Company, LLC, and is a member of the Investment Committee of both Griffin Capital Credit Advisor, LLC and Griffin Capital Advisor, LLC, the respective investment advisors to Griffin Institutional Access™ Credit Fund and Griffin Institutional Access™ Real Estate Fund. Mr. Rupert also serves as Executive Vice President of Griffin Capital Essential Asset REIT I and II.
Mr. Rupert’s 36 years of commercial real estate and finance experience includes over $9 billion of transaction volume on four continents. Mr. Rupert has been President of Griffin Capital since 2010, and served as Chief Operating Officer of Griffin Capital from 2000-2008. He is also an Investment Committee Member of Griffin Institutional Access Real Estate Fund, Griffin Capital’s ’40 Act interval fund. Mr. Rupert’s career began in the early 1980’s when he worked for Chemical Bank (now JP Morgan) in the credit analysis, loan workout and commercial lending areas, and continued at investment banking firm Salomon Brothers (now Citi), where for a decade he was a senior member of the real estate finance department, working in various capacities providing advice and raising debt and equity capital for leading public and private real estate institutions and entrepreneurs; his final responsibilities included heading the firm’s REIT underwriting effort. Between 2008 and 2010 Mr. Rupert co-headed an opportunistic hotel fund in partnership with The Olympia Companies, an 800-employee hotel owner-operator, and served as partner in a private equity firm focused on hotel and multifamily residential development in Eastern Europe.
For the past 22 years Mr. Rupert has served on the Real Estate Advisory Committee to the Cornell University endowment fund; in 2012 Mr. Rupert was appointed Co- Chairman of that group. Mr. Rupert is a founding board member of the masters program in real estate at Cornell, and for more than two decades has guest lectured in graduate level courses and served as a student mentor. Mr. Rupert currently serves as the President and Chairman of the Board of the Harvard Business School Real Estate Alumni Association.
Mr. Rupert holds a Bachelors of Arts from Cornell University and a Masters of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.
Paul Rubacha
Paul Rubacha for nearly thirty-five years has participated as a guest lecturer and panelist for various real estate courses at Cornell.
Paul is Chairman of the Baker Real Estate Advisory Board as well as Co-Chair of the Real Estate Subcommittee of the University’s Investment Committee. He has actively served with the Architecture Advisory Board for over a decade.
Paul is a Co-Founder and Principal at privately held Ashley Capital. He has primary responsibility for financing and capital transactions. Paul supervises a professional staff located in four cities and oversees all facets of acquisition, development and management of Ashley’s twenty five million square foot portfolio.
Prior to co-founding Ashely capital, Paul served in senior capacities within the Real Estate Departments of Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Prudential Insurance Company, He holds both an undergraduate degree and MBA from Cornell University. Paul has been a real estate lecturer at several universities and served as a panelist for various organizations including the Urban Land Institute, the U.S Department of Transportation and Institutional Investor Magazine, he has been awarded the distinction of Counselor of Real Estate.
Lynn Gray
LYNN ZUCKERMAN GRAY is the Founder and CEO of Campus Scout, LLC, an innovative provider of strategic campus and recent graduate recruiting services, Career Coaching for young professionals and bespoke training programs for employers, primarily focused on the Millennial and Z generations. Since its inception in mid-2009, Campus Scout has recruited at 101 Graduate and Undergraduate campuses throughout the United States and has successfully assisted in the hiring of recent college and Business/professional School graduates for foreign and domestic clients in the financial services, real estate, technology and hospitality industries.
Lynn has a long history in financial services, the Law and the academic world. Prior to founding Campus Scout, she was a banker and lender focused on the origination of corporate sale/leaseback and commercial real estate transactions in the aggregate of more than $10 billion. From 1997 to 2008 she was with Lehman Brothers/Barclays, where she served as the Real Estate Group’s Global Chief Administrative Officer and as an originator of debt and equity transactions.
A graduate of Tufts University and the Cornell University Law School, Ms. Gray serves on the Advisory Board of the Cornell Baker Graduate Program in Real Estate and is an Adjunct Professor at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business where she has taught Leadership and Real Estate Finance. She also is a Certified Facilitator for the SUNY Levin Global Center’s FastTrac New Venture and FastTrac Growth Venture Entrepreneurship training programs. Recently she was named to the 2017 class of WE NYC Mentors sponsored by the New York City Small Business Administration. She has written and been a featured speaker extensively on talent management, entrepreneurship and real estate topics.
Ms. Gray and Campus Scout have been highlighted often in domestic and foreign media (NY Times; Wall Street Journal; The Financial Times; More Magazine; Crain’s New York; Time Out New York; CNBC.com; CNNMoney.com; US News and World Report; Huffington Post; More Magazine; Crain’s New York; TVE Television of Spain; TF1 French Television; CBC Canadian Radio; Japanese Public Television; Dagens Naeringsliv (Norwegian Financial Newspaper); and Sankei Shimbun (Japanese Newspaper)).
The Leadership Team needs you!
CREC is looking for leaders (and those who would like to grow into leaders) to join our Leadership Team. We are reaching out to alumni of Cornell University who work in the very broadly defined ‘real estate industry’ and to current students studying real estate or related fields, to encourage your involvement.
Just as Cornell was founded on a mission of diversity, so too are we focused on building a leadership team with diverse points of view, and varying degrees of experience and seniority. We would like to re-engage those who have volunteered in the past, and attract new leaders, including those who are in the early stages of their careers. Our needs are broad and include:
- Seasoned alumni willing to volunteer time, expertise, and funding. Regarding the latter, in order for CREC to be a first class organization and make a meaningful impact, we need to develop a budget, and over time a modest endowment to enable and fund our efforts.
- Active volunteers with good ideas, creativity and peer networks to conceive, market and host interesting events, contribute fresh content to our website and to our social media feed, and help organize the many other volunteers who want to help fulfill CREC’s mission.
- Leaders willing to organize and operate Regional Chapters. We are starting with a handful of chapters, but we are optimistic that others will form over our first couple years of operation.
- Leaders living and working outside the U.S. We know there are many Cornellians, including a number of Baker graduates, working in Europe and Asia, and we would love to connect with you and explore the feasibility of adding Regional Chapters overseas.
