Upon earning a bachelor’s in finance in 1980, Tara Stacom joined Time Inc.'s HBO division and embarked on a sales career in New York City. A year later, when the division was shut down, she went to work for commercial real-estate giant Cushman & Wakefield Inc.

Today, Stacom is renowned for her ability to match properties and clients. As executive vice chairman of Cushman & Wakefield, she has completed some of the industry’s largest and most complex leasing, sales and corporate finance transactions.

In 2007, she won the exclusive leasing rights to America’s most famous building: the 1,776-foot-high One World Trade Center and its 3 million square feet of office space.

In 2009, to connect students and alumni with notable figures in real estate, Stacom endowed the Stacom Family Speaker Series in the Integrated Real Estate at Lehigh (ire@l) Program in Lehigh’s College of Business and Economics.