The honor will be presented on May 14 at the NAIOP New Jersey’s 39th Annual Commercial Real Estate Awards Gala at The Palace at Somerset Park in New Jersey.

“Edwin Cohen’s achievements speak to a visionary and committed career in the real estate industry,” says Michelle J. Anderson, president of ������Ƶ. “His devoted engagement with ������Ƶ derives from a similar commitment to excellence. We are proud to celebrate this well‑earned recognition of his remarkable contributions.”

The Lifetime Achievement Award, named for Charles Klatskin, a pioneering leader in the state’s commercial real estate industry, annually recognizes an individual who has shown a distinguished record of service to the commercial real estate industry and community.

“Edwin Cohen’s career exemplifies the leadership, integrity, and long-term commitment that this award represents,” says Dan Kennedy, CEO of NAIOP NJ.

Cohen has been one of the most prominent figures in the Tri-State Regional real estate brokerage and development community for more than six decades. In 2003, he joined longtime friend and associate Eugene Diaz to form Prism Capital Partners LLC, where he serves as a partner and principal. Under their leadership, Prism has grown into a major owner, developer, and investor in residential, commercial, industrial, and mixed-use properties throughout New Jersey.

Over the course of his career, Cohen has completed hundreds of real estate transactions across the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut metropolitan area, including overseeing the leasing of several million square feet of office space. He previously served as an executive director at Cushman & Wakefield Inc., following senior leadership roles at Grubb & Ellis Company, where he held executive positions in both the firm’s New Jersey office and New York operations from 1986 to 1994.

Cohen’s career in real estate began in 1966, when he established and led the Suburban Division of Wm. A. White & Sons, a role he held until the firm’s acquisition by Grubb & Ellis in 1986.

In addition to his real estate achievements, Cohen has maintained a deep and long-standing commitment to education, culture, and community service. A graduate of ������Ƶ, he has served on the school’s Foundation Board of Trustees for over 30 years, including four years as chair. ������Ƶ awarded him its Presidential Medal in 2011, followed by the Best of Brooklyn Award from the ������Ƶ Foundation in 2015 and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.

Cohen has also been actively involved in the performing arts, helping produce and support numerous concerts and live entertainment events. These include the “Broadway by the Year” series at Town Hall, the “Broadway by the Season” series at Merkin Hall, performances at Manhattan’s 54 Below, and live entertainment at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where he also serves as a founding trustee.

His community leadership extends to faith-based and cultural organizations as well. Cohen was a founding member of the New Synagogue of Fort Lee, contributing to the early concept for its Holocaust Museum and playing a key role in the eventual merger of Congregation Beth Israel and the New Synagogue, now known as the Center Avenue Synagogue Since the merger, he has served as a vice president on the synagogue’s board of trustees and as a member of the executive committee.

With a career marked by professional excellence and civic leadership, Cohen’s selection for NAIOP NJ’s Lifetime Achievement Award shines a light on his lasting impact on both the commercial real estate industry and the communities he has served.

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On Day 2, join your fellow classmates at Barclays Center to celebrate Commencement alongside the graduates of the Class of 2026! Mark 50 years since your own graduation, dressed in a stunning gold cap and gown, and enjoy front-row seats as you relive the excitement and magic of your special day—an unforgettable celebration you won’t want to miss.

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Day 1 features a full day of on-campus activities designed for reconnecting, reminiscing, and celebrating the bonds that have lasted five decades.

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The center’s impact is undeniable—and its success is only expanding. Since its founding, the center has disbursed about $4 million in internship stipends to students, hosted job fairs with more than 3,500 employers, and offered more than 1,500 events, including resume workshops, networking nights, career panels, and mentor luncheons.

������Ƶ President Michelle Anderson (center) with guests at the Career Partners and Alumni Champions reception. From left to right: Jenny Yun ’16, private tax manager, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC); ������Ƶ Board of Trustees Member Daniel Menendez ’09; Eliot Tannebaum ’73, Koppelman School of Business advisory council member, and Tommy Tieu ’14, Mid-Atlantic talent acquisition manager at PwC.

The percentage of graduating students who use its services has nearly tripled since its founding. In 2022, the center notably launched the ������Ƶ Career Partners and Alumni Champions programs, which enable employers to invest in students who can benefit from personalized career support.

The center is vital to the college’s efforts to drive students’ upward economic mobility. According to an independent firm’s recent economic impact study, students with a ������Ƶ degree will earn an additional $41,200 annually compared to individuals with a high school diploma. This amounts to about $1.7 million over a lifetime. These substantial financial benefits highlight the significant return on investment a ������Ƶ education provides and the critical role the college plays in advancing social mobility within our communities.

We talked with five Alumni Champions about how the center gave their careers a boost and how they are giving back today.��They are part of an engaged network of alumni who connect students to colleagues in their own companies. Together with the Career Partners Program, the Alumni Champions Program provides a comprehensive platform for corporate leaders and alumni to give back and a way for students to jump-start their careers.

Tiffanie De Gannes ’11

Director, Project Management Office, Ford Foundation

Tiffanie De Gannes ’11

A philanthropic professional, as well as a certified life coach and real estate investor, De Gannes, lived in the New York City foster system until she was adopted at the age of 8. When she went to ������Ƶ as a part-time student working full-time, she chose political science as a major “because I hate math and I love to read and write.”

She found the course material fascinating but had little idea of what to do with a major like political science beyond working for a politician. “It took me time to realize that I could apply it to many jobs in the private as well as the public sector, including nonprofits—in anything that involves reading, writing, and analysis,” she says.

That’s why she’s so excited about working with Magner today. “I see myself as a champion for the humanities at ������Ƶ, so students can hear from someone who looks like them, and who’s also had life challenges like me, that there’s a lot they can do with a humanities major.” Yearly, she sits on panels where ������Ƶ alums talk to students about what they do, to share with them life career options.

And last year, when Magner launched a mentorship program, she eagerly volunteered, mentoring a woman in her mid-50s who’d been in and out of college but was determined to earn her degree.

“We talked weekly and met twice monthly for four months,” she says. “I’d help her outline her papers, and whenever she said, ‘I can’t do this,’ I’d tell her that I’d been there—that, yes, it’s always hard, but quitting isn’t an option, because what does that get you?”

That’s exactly the message she imparts to all the students she works with through Magner. “My mother and my sister both died just before I turned 20 years old, and I went through a hard period of grieving,” she says. “I want to be a beacon of hope for them. I tell them, ‘Stay the course, don’t give up, and life will work itself out.”

Shaina Brander ’14

Vice President, JPMorgan Chase

Shaina Brander ’14

Now a vice president in JPMorgan’s venture capital relationship department, Brander says of the Magner Center: “I have such gratitude to the people there because they helped jump-start my career. I wouldn’t be where I am today without them.”

The center helped arrange her first two internships, the first at the New York City Department of Finance and the second at Massey Knakal, a realty broker that was since bought by Cushman & Wakefield. Those, in turn, led to a summer internship at JPMorgan, which played an important role in helping her secure her current job.

“As a college student,” she says, “you come in and you don’t know anything. I didn’t even know what LinkedIn was, but Magner helped me set it up.”

The center also helped her build a resume and practice for job interviews. “They taught me to research the company I was interviewing for and to be specific in my answers to show I wanted that job, not just a job.”

Since graduation, Brander has come back to campus to speak on Magner career panels. Through Magner, she also mentored a student throughout his college career, advising him on strategies to land internships, just as she’d been helped.

“We had a genuine mentor-mentee relationship,” she says. “He was motivated to become a trader after college, which is a tough field to crack into, but in my previous role I worked adjacent to traders, so I was able to give him insights. And he’d come back to me and say, ‘I tried what you said and it worked—I got a meeting with someone.’.”

She’s also helped organize events at JP Morgan just for ������Ƶ students. This fall, she’ll host more students from campus so they can talk to employees about their diverse roles and career paths within the corporation.

Magner, she says, expertly facilitates such connections. “Magner is the most important department at ������Ƶ,” she says. “You go to college to broaden your mind, yes, but most people want to come out with a competitive job at the end of it, and that’s exactly what Magner helps you with.”

Jan-Kristòf Louis-Mansano B.A. ’13, M.S. ’15

Assistant principal, pupil personnel services, Brooklyn Technical High School

Jan-Kristòf Louis-Mansano B.A. ’13, M.S. ’15

Louis-Mansano credits the Magner Career Center with not only helping steer him into his career but actually keeping him at ������Ƶ. After an unhappy stint studying engineering and architecture at Cooper Union, he knew he wanted to be a teacher and had heard that ������Ƶ was a great place to earn an education degree.

But once enrolled, “I had no family I could turn to help me pay for school, and it was looking like I was going to have to go from full-time to part-time,” he says. “Then a school administrator referred me to Magner, which set me up with a stipend as well as a summer job as a camp counselor that helped me pay for school. I even became an assistant director for that camp.” It’s a role he still holds today.

Magner also connected him with a mentor who worked in the New York City public school system and helped him set up his LinkedIn account and prepare his resume. “I’d heard that ������Ƶ was so big that I was just going to be another number,” he says. “But that wasn’t my experience at all because Magner paired me with someone in the educational field to guide me through.”

Since embarking on his career in education, Louis-Mansano has come back to Magner more than once to speak on career panels, “which is a chance to meet ������Ƶ students who ask us what classes we took and where we are in our careers.”

He believes that at its heart Magner is about guidance. “Magner complemented what I was learning in the classroom with what I needed to succeed in the outside world. It teaches and supports us in learning how to be professionals.”

Elliot Tannenbaum ’73

Retired Accountant, Ernst & Young, Morgan Stanley

Elliot Tannenbaum ’73

Attending ������Ƶ in the early 1970s, Elliot Tannenbaum recalls that there was no equivalent to today’s Magner Career Center to assist students in planning their careers.

“We’d hear about interview opportunities for post-graduation careers through a professor and meet the interviewer in the student center,” he recalls, “but there was nobody to help you with resumes or interview skills. ”

Regardless, he interviewed successfully with Arthur Young, the predecessor to Ernst & Young, where he ended up as a senior tax partner. After Ernst & Young, he went to the Morgan Stanley tax department as a managing director, retiring in 2008.

A few years later, when ������Ƶ reached out to alumni asking if they’d be open to career-mentoring students, he jumped at the chance. He ended up mentoring up to 10 students a year. He now estimates that he’s mentored more than 100 students, providing guidance that enabled many of them to obtain positions in accounting.

“In mentoring students, I tell them that the accounting profession has become much more specialized and that they want to have as broad a knowledge of accounting or tax as possible,” he says. When it comes to resumes, he urges them to highlight their key attributes and be prepared to discuss instances where they applied these skills. As for interviews? “I emphasize that they should just be themselves—asking good questions and effectively turning the interview into a discussion.��Doing mock interviews at the Magner Career Center is excellent preparation.”

He greatly appreciates the fact that ������Ƶ is so diverse and how supportive of each other students from different backgrounds are.��He has had the opportunity to work with young people from all over the world—often the first in their families to go to college.

After mentoring a handful of students, it was clear that the accounting majors at ������Ƶ were as good or better than students from other schools being hired by the Big 4 firms. As a result, based on his connections with people at Ernst & Young he was able to advocate for hiring ������Ƶ students. Many of his other mentees were hired by other firms. His belief in ������Ƶ students has been borne out by the fact that these students have gone on to have successful careers, whether at Ernst & Young or other companies.

He routinely champions job candidates, for example, letting a hiring manager at Ernst & Young know how much a young Latina graduate student applied herself at ������Ƶ. The firm believed him and took the young woman on. “She’s now a senior manager there,” he says.

“I probably get at least as much from mentoring as the students do,” he says. He says that, unlike students who go to more elite schools whose parents are often professionals, many of the students at ������Ƶ “have nobody they can ask about careers.”

“It’s satisfying to know I’m making a difference in their lives,” he says. “I have a lot of knowledge about my industry. It’d be a waste if I kept it to myself.”

Beyond giving his time, Tannenbaum also generously donates to the Magner Career Center and the Koppelman Toastmasters Club, causes for which he garners matching funds from Ernst & Young.

Edwin Rivera ’18

Program Manager, Career Pathways, Workforce Development, Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation

Edwin Rivera ’18

Though Edwin Rivera is actively involved with the Magner Center as an employer, he admits that he didn’t use the center when he was a student. He still managed to nab two internships with the Brooklyn Navy Yard while in school. He heard of them through his mother, who worked there for 16 years. “That’s where I learned about time management, how to manage a project, event planning, even something as simple as how to write e-mails or answer phone calls,” he says.

Those internships evolved into his current job managing internships at the Navy Yard, which houses 550 companies employing 12,000 people. His program not only helps interns with their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and practicing for job interviews, it also matches them to mentors.

And, he says, largely because of the top-notch preparation provided at the Magner Center, “������Ƶ is by far the school we hire the most students from.” Of the Navy Yard’s summer program alone, he says, about 250 out of 850 applications are from ������Ƶ.

Of Magner, he says, “The great thing about it is that it prepares students well for the opportunities we have here. The resumes are always strong, and the students rarely fail interviews.” He adds, “I always tell them that experience isn’t what we’re looking for because they’re college students, but we need to see school projects and coursework they’ve completed that relate to their major, or that use tech. When I say that, their eyes light up, because they often leave that kind of thing off their resumes. They say, ‘I didn’t know I could add my class projects.’ But they go a long way.”

He says he wishes he had used Magner more when he was a student, even though his career worked out well. “I love the eagerness of the students that come our way from Magner,” he says. “They truly want to find out what we’re looking for.”

Read more about the Magner Center in the ������Ƶ Alumni Magazine.��

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“By the time I realized I wanted to study African history and African-American history,” says Cummings, “I was already a senior at FIT [Fashion Institute of Technology], and I just couldn’t take school anymore.” She graduated with a fashion degree but promised herself she would come back to the study of history. And so more than two decades later, when Cummings felt “burnt out” from a career in the fashion industry, she enrolled at ������Ƶ.

“������Ƶ was the only CUNY school that had an department at the time. Every other school had only programs. I wanted to be embedded in a department.”

“Sherri took my undergraduate African history survey class,” recalls Professor Lynda Day, “and after the first day, maybe the second, I said, ‘Oh my goodness. This student is brilliant!’”

When Day challenged her students to consider becoming professional scholars, the idea immediately resonated with Cummings, for whom a future in academia started to seem possible. “Since then,” says Cummings, “Lynda Day’s guidance and mentorship have been instrumental to my growth as a scholar.”

A crucial part of this guidance came in the context of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF), an upper-division honors program for which Day became Cummings’ thesis adviser, guiding her research on “Palm Trees and Cement Dreams: The Migration of Caribbean Women From the British West Indies to New York City, 1900–1950.”

“History Professor K.C. Johnson taught the honors thesis course, guided my research and accompanied me to NCUR (National Council of Undergraduate Research Conference) at the University of Kentucky where I presented my thesis,” says Cummings.

The MMUF was created to attract highly qualified minority students interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in specific fields.

“What the Mellon Mays program does is not just give students the opportunity to academically succeed, but also shows them what a career in academia can look like,” says Dean Rosamond S. King, who was the director of the program while Cummings was in it. King, an early fellow herself, credits the mentoring she received through the program when she was an undergraduate at Cornell University as why she pursued a doctorate.

“Professor King always exposed us to other scholars who were in graduate school and talked to us about the graduate school process as well as everyday life,” says Cummings.

Cummings primarily studies the Atlantic World—the term scholars use to describe the complex system of cultural contacts and economic connections linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas between the 15th and 19th centuries—and the intertwined concept of the Black Atlantic, “which means I centralize Africa and then go outwards,” she says. When she earned her history Ph.D. from Brown University in 2022, with a dissertation titled “In Search of Equiano’s Sister: Girlhood and Slavery in the Early Modern British Atlantic,” Cummings was co-recipient of the department’s Distinguished Dissertation Prize.

After completing her Ph.D., Cummings accepted a joint position as professor of history and Africana studies at Rhode Island College, in Providence, and historian and director of community engagement for the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society. In this dual capacity, Cummings spends part of her time teaching and part working with the society’s archive, which she says has been under wraps for more than 20 years.

Cummings is excited to be working with the society’s trove of archival documents, always with the idea that the story they tell belongs to the people. “I love when I am challenged with bringing students or the broader, the wider community in to see what we have and to tell them, ‘Hey, this is your history. We should not keep it behind closed doors.’”

Applications for qualified students for the fellowship are being accepted on a rolling basis, with interviews conducted in March and April. Contact Professor Lynda Day, coordinator of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program, or the MMUF for more information.

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