Howard Gellis graduated cum laude from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and received his MBA from the Harvard Business School. As an undergraduate, he served the Pennsylvania Zeta Chapter as both treasurer and recruitment chairman.
Brother Gellis’ career has spanned over 30 years of leveraged finance management experience as a skilled evaluator of business strategy, financial structure and senior management capabilities. He has been certified as an Expert Witness by the United States Tax Court. Howard is a retired senior managing director and head of The Blackstone Group’s Corporate Debt Investment Group, which he co-founded in 1999. He was also a member of Blackstone Debt Advisors’ Investment Committee and a member of the firm’s Executive Committee.
Prior to joining Blackstone, he was a managing director and head of Nomura Holding America Inc.’s Leveraged Capital Group, which he founded in 1994. Previously, Mr. Gellis headed mezzanine and institutional marketing activities for Alliance Capital Management, L.P.’s corporate finance group (and its predecessor, Equitable Capital Management Corporation). Prior to that, he was VP and GM of GE Capital’s Western Corporate Finance.
Brother Gellis has extensive higher education and non-profit board experience and has endowed several scholarships at the University of Pennsylvania and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He is a former member of the board of overseers of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where he and his wife, Joan also endowed The Gellis Family Scholarship Fund. Howard and Joan also created an athletic endowment at UNC, Chapel Hill to support the travel expenses of the University’s varsity fencing teams.
Howard is a generous donor to the Phi Delta Theta Foundation and was invited as a Kleberg Fellow to the annual Kleberg Emerging Leaders Institute. He and Joan have two sons, Jordan, a CPA, and Benjamin, who is a Florida Assistant State Attorney.