Bringing nearly 25 years of finance and academic real estate experience, Donald D. Sheets has been named the new executive director of the Ohio State Center for Real Estate.

Sheets, managing director and member of the management committee at Broadshore Capital Partners, will also serve as a senior lecturer in finance at the Max M. Fisher College of Business.

“We are delighted to welcome Donald to the Fisher, Ohio State and central Ohio communities,” said Anil K. Makhija, dean and John W. Berry, Sr. Chair in Business. “As a finance leader and a recognized expert in real estate, Donald brings to us a unique set of skills and perspectives that span practice and academia and align with the mission of the Center for Real Estate as well as our teaching faculty.”

Sheets has 24 years of leadership experience on Wall Street across several investment management firms, one of which he founded nearly a decade ago and recently sold. His team at Broadshore underwrote, serviced and resolved investments on behalf of its cornerstone investors comprised of Harvard Management Company, Bain Capital Real Estate and the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System. He will step down from his position at Broadshore to fill the joint appointment at Fisher beginning December 5.

“These new appointments at arguably one of the most respected and recognizable institutions in the world represent an exciting personal step forward for me,” Sheets said. “The Center for Real Estate is an established resource for a dynamic real estate community here in central Ohio, and I look forward to building on its strong foundation of research, student opportunity and outreach to industry.”

Prior to Broadshore, Sheets was a partner and managing director at Clarion Partners upon its acquisition of AlumCreek Holdings, a private equity platform that he founded and scaled. Sheets was senior principal and co-led the transaction team at Square Mile Capital Management after he had launched and scaled a special situations commercial real estate platform at Davidson Kempner Capital Management. Prior to earning an MBA, he worked with The Carlyle Group, EastBanc and Starwood Urban Investments.

Sheets’ academic work includes faculty appointments at Columbia University and New York University, where he developed the inaugural graduate-level distressed real estate investing electives within each institution’s curriculum. He was appointed to the faculty at Auburn University and lectured at Georgetown University, The George Washington University, Harvard University and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His pedagogy spans undergraduate and graduate programs with a curricula of capital markets, distressed investing, structured finance, law, negotiation and private equity.

He is a board member and chair of the audit committee of Educational Housing Services — New York’s largest student housing operator — and serves as chair of the Harvard Alumni Real Estate Board.  He is active with the Commercial Real Estate Finance Council, having prior appointments to the Board of Governors, co-chair emeritus of the Education Committee, co-chair emeritus of the High Yield and Distressed Realty Assets Forum, and member of the Editorial Board.

Sheets earned a BBA magna cum laude from The George Washington University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.