Real estate developer Ani Nazerian Gabrellian ’84, financial services executive Evans Lam ’83, ’84S (MBA), real estate and investment company president Ronald Rettner, and optics entrepreneur and scientist James Wyant ’67 (MS), ’69 (PhD) have joined the University of Rochester’s Board of Trustees.
Gabrellian is a principal in Gabrellian Associates, a commercial real estate and management company based in Paramus, N.J. After receiving her MBA from George Washington University, she held positions as a commercial and investment banker and as a financial analyst with the federal Office of Thrift Supervision. She and her husband, Mark ’79, endowed a multidisciplinary professorship in Arts, Sciences, & Engineering to better understand political and economic issues, and they permanently endowed an innovation grant for outstanding incoming undergraduates.
Lam is senior vice president of investments and senior portfolio manager of The Lam Group, UBS Financial Services, Inc. in Pasadena, Calif. Previously, he was a senior vice president and wealth management advisor at Smith Barney. He and his wife, Susanna, have established a professorship at the Simon School to help recruit global business scholars. Lam is also a vice president and major contributor to the Morning Light Foundation, which builds elementary boarding schools in remote China stricken by poverty and provides 400 scholarships annually to underprivileged students among eight major Chinese universities.
A member of numerous civic and charitable boards, Rettner is president of Rettner Management Corporation and is managing partner of Baron Associates, a real estate investment, finance, and management company with national holdings. Earlier in his career, Rettner was a securities analyst and co-founded The Vitamin Shoppes. He earned his undergraduate degree in political science at Washington University in St. Louis and master’s degree in business administration and urban planning from Columbia University, and attended the evening division at Fordham University Law School. Rettner has served on the National Council of Arts and Sciences at Washington University since 1990 and was the recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2009, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Alumni Award in 2007, and the New York Regional Cabinet’s Alumni of the Year Award in 2009, and has guest lectured on real estate topics.
An optical scientist with long associations to Rochester, Wyant is a former dean of the University of Arizona’s College of Optics. He is an expert in the fields of interference, diffraction, and optical testing, and is the co-founder and chairman of 4D Technology Corporation. Wyant endowed the M. Parker Givens Professorship in Optics in honor of one of his former professors at Rochester. A professor of optical sciences and of electrical and computer engineering at Arizona, Wyant has been a visiting professor at the Institute of Optics since 1983.
All of the new trustees are members of the George Eastman Circle.
