Penn’s 2024 Commencement Speaker and Honorary Degree Recipients Announced
Physician, researcher, and best-selling author Siddhartha Mukherjee will be the speaker at the 2024 University of Pennsylvania Commencement on Monday, May 20, 2024. He and five other individuals will each receive an honorary degree from Penn.
Medha Narvekar, Penn’s Vice President and University Secretary, has announced the 2024 honorary degree recipients and the commencement speaker for the University of Pennsylvania. The Office of the University Secretary manages the honorary degree selection process and University Commencement.
The 268th Commencement begins at 10:15 a.m. on Monday, May 20, and will be preceded by student and academic processions through campus. The ceremony will feature the conferral of degrees, the awarding of honorary degrees, greetings by University officials, and remarks by the Commencement speaker. It will be streamed live on the Penn website. For University of Pennsylvania Commencement information, including historical information about the ceremony, academic regalia, prior speakers and honorary degree recipients, see https://commencement.upenn.edu/.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, DPhil, is a physician, researcher, and author who serves as an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and as an oncologist at the university’s medical center. Dr. Mukherjee’s trilogy of books has made a vast contribution to the public discourse on human health, medicine, and science.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer earned the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and The Gene: An Intimate History won international awards and was recognized by The Washington Post and The New York Times as one of the most influential books of 2016. Both books have been adapted into PBS documentaries by the renowned filmmaker Ken Burns. The Emperor of All Maladies was included among TIME magazine’s 100 best nonfiction books of the past century.
As a medical scholar, Dr. Mukherjee has conducted groundbreaking innovative research that signals a paradigm shift in cancer pathology and has enabled the development of treatments that disrupt current pharmaceutical models toward new biological and cellular therapies. He was among the first to make cellular therapies available in India. His groundbreaking research is now being translated into a record number of concurrent clinical trials across the globe, spanning novel therapies for ovarian, breast and endometrial cancer, leukemias and lymphomas, and a variety of other diseases. Only a select few medical scholars have been able to translate their work into human trials of such depth and breadth.
Dr. Mukherjee writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He has received numerous awards for his scientific work and has published his original research and opinions in journals such as Nature, Cell, and The New England Journal of Medicine. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
A native of India, Dr. Mukherjee received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. After graduating from Harvard Medical School, he completed his internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and his hematology-oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Dr. Mukherjee will receive an honorary Doctor of Sciences.
Ingrid Daubechies
Ingrid Daubechies, PhD, is the James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Dr. Daubechies’ academic work focuses on mathematical methods for the analysis of signals, images, and data.
Early in her career, she constructed particularly convenient families of wavelets, mathematical tools that enable the compression of images without loss of the crisp detail; their use has become commonplace on today’s electronic screens. The New York Times called her the “godmother of the digital image.” Over the years, Dr. Daubechies has expanded the application of wavelets. She frequently collaborates with experts in a wide range of fields, such as geophysics, neuroscience, biological morphology, medical imaging, and in art conservation.
Dr. Daubechies has received numerous awards. She was the first woman to receive the Wolf Prize, one of the most prestigious in mathematics. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Science, as well as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the MacArthur Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
An advocate for the field of mathematics, Dr. Daubechies recently collaborated on a mixed media art installation, titled “Mathemalchemy,” that celebrates the beauty, creativity, and fun of mathematics. The project is currently touring the United States.
A native of Belgium, Dr. Daubechies earned her PhD in theoretical physics from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels).
Dr. Daubechies will receive an honorary Doctor of Sciences.
Karl Deisseroth
Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Dr. Deisseroth is a practicing psychiatrist at Stanford with specialization in major depression and autism-spectrum disease, employing medications along with neural stimulation. His laboratory has developed groundbreaking technologies to better understand brain circuitry and improve mental health care, including optogenetics, which engineers individual brain cells to be controlled by light, and CLARITY, which allows for the investigation of intact biological systems.
Dr. Deisseroth received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University, and both his PhD and MD from Stanford. He also completed his postdoctoral training, medical internship, and adult psychiatry residency at Stanford, and is board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.
In 2021, he published his highly acclaimed first book, Projections: A Story of Human Emotions, a work of literary nonfiction in which he shares perspectives on his patients with psychiatric disorders.
Among many other honors, Dr. Deisseroth was the sole recipient for optogenetics of the Koetser Prize (2010), the Nakasone Prize (2010), the W. Alden Spencer Prize (2011), the Richard Lounsbery Prize (2013), the Dickson Prize in Science (2014), the Keio Medical Science Prize (2015), the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences (2015), the Albany Prize (2015), the Dickson Prize in Medicine (2015), the Redelsheimer Prize (2017), the Else Kröner Fresenius Prize (2017), the NOMIS Distinguished Scientist Award (2017), the Frances and Kenneth Eisenberg Translational Research Prize (2018), the Kyoto Prize (2018), the Heineken Prize in Medicine from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020), and the Japan Prize (2023).
He was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2013 and was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Medicine in 2010, to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2012, and to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2019.
Dr. Deisseroth will receive an honorary Doctor of Sciences.
Kenny Gamble
Born in Philadelphia, Kenneth Gamble grew up surrounded by music and spent much of his youth working in the music industry. He cut his first records at local penny arcade recording booths, brought coffee to WDAS morning radio personalities Georgie Woods and Jimmy Bishop, and operated his own record store in South Philadelphia.
In the mid-1960s, Mr. Gamble met Camden native and pianist Leon Huff and the two quickly discovered their shared love of songwriting and composing. After some early successes with their own homemade labels, Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff created “Philadelphia International Records” (PIR) in 1971, giving birth to what would become widely known as “the Philly Sound.” Through then-CBS Records president Clive Davis, PIR secured a distribution deal through America’s largest record label. Within a year of PIR opening its doors, the O’Jays had #1 R&B and pop hits, including “Backstabbers” and “Love Train”, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes were riding high with “If You Don’t Know Me By Now”, and Billy Paul earned the label’s first Grammy with “Me and Mrs. Jones.” During the early 1970s, PIR was a dominant force in the R&B and pop music industries. Two years after its creation, PIR was the second largest African American-owned music company in the United States, just behind Motown. CBS Records was now distributing more soul music than at any time in the company’s history. In 2008, forty-five years after the duo’s first collaborations, Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the inaugural Ahmet Ertegun Award, one of many honors they have received over the years. In 2015, Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff served as the first African American chairmen of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Currently, Mr. Gamble serves as an honorary member of the Board of Directors of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, which honors the legacies and accomplishments of songwriters globally. He also continues to advise local singers, producers, and musicians on building their music careers.
Mr. Gamble will be receiving an honorary Doctor of Music.
Leon Huff
Born in Camden, New Jersey, Leon Huff was first exposed to music through his mother, who taught her son the basics on the family’s piano, the only one on the block. He went on to receive formal training and as a young man, performed as a session musician with his musical idols, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, and many others.
When Mr. Huff met fellow musician Kenneth Gamble in the mid-1960s, the duo discovered they had a common interest in songwriting and production. They began a songwriting partnership that exists to this day. Along with Mr. Gamble, Mr. Huff has written or co-written more than 3,500 songs over 60 years, including R&B #1 hits, pop #1 hits, gold and platinum records, Grammy winners, and more.
By 1971, Mr. Huff and Mr. Gamble had formed their own label, Philadelphia International Records (PIR), and secured a distribution deal with CBS. With a stable core of artists – the O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Billy Paul, and others, PIR generated hit after hit almost from day one.
Mr. Huff and Mr. Gamble have received countless honors, including their 1995 induction into the National Academy of Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. They received the 1999 Trustees Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, as well as induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Dance Music Hall of Fame in 2005. In 2010, they were honored by the City of Philadelphia in a special ceremony to rename the block of South Broad Street they made famous to “people all over the world” as “Gamble & Huff Walk.”
Today, Mr. Huff continues to produce and write songs, and is never far from a piano or keyboard when the inspiration arises.
Mr. Huff will receive an honorary Doctor of Music.
Maya Lin
Artist, designer, and environmentalist Maya Lin interprets the natural world through science, history, and culture to create works that have a profound impact on how we view our history and how we relate to the natural world. Since her very first work, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Ms. Lin has gone on to a remarkable and highly acclaimed career in both art and architecture, while still being committed to memory works that focus on some of the critical historical issues of our time.
Ms. Lin has been recognized around the world for her distinct aesthetic vision with groundbreaking site-specific art installations such as the recent Madison Square Park installation, Ghost Forest, and the recently completed Decoding the Tree of Life for Penn Medicine’s Pavilion. Her celebrated architectural projects range from the Nielsen Library for Smith College to Novartis’ campus headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with buildings in progress for a performing arts lab space at Bard College, to the new design for the Museum of Chinese in America in downtown Manhattan. She is deeply committed to sustainable and site sensitive design methods in all her projects.
Ms. Lin is a member of the Bloomberg Foundation, the What is Missing? Foundation, and she is a National Geographic Explorer-at-Large. She has been profiled in TIME magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, among others. In 2009, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Ms. Lin the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, praising her for a celebrated career in both art and architecture and for creating a sacred place of healing in the nation’s capital.
Ms. Lin earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree at Yale University.
Ms. Lin will receive an honorary Doctor of Arts.
Sarah E. Light: Inaugural Mitchell J. Blutt and Margo Krody Blutt Presidential Professor
Penn Interim President J. Larry Jameson and Wharton Dean Erika H. James have announced the appointment of Sarah E. Light as the inaugural recipient of the Mitchell J. Blutt and Margo Krody Blutt Presidential Professorship at the Wharton School, which is one of three Presidential Professorships that Mitchell J. Blutt, C’78, M’82, WG’87 and Margo Blutt have established at the University of Pennsylvania. The three Presidential Professorships are at the Wharton School, Penn Arts & Sciences, and the Perelman School of Medicine, the three Penn schools Dr. Blutt attended.
Presidential professorships allow the University to recruit and retain exceptional faculty. The Mitchell J. Blutt and Margo Krody Blutt Presidential Professorship was established in 2017 and is dedicated to a Wharton faculty appointment. This professorship enables the school to recognize the academic achievements of Wharton professor Sarah E. Light in a way that befits her meaningful contributions.
“The Presidential professorship recognizes and supports Sarah Light’s pathbreaking research and teaching, which explores critical connections between business and law and addressing climate change—an area of focus for Penn’s strategic framework In Principle and Practice,” said Interim President Jameson. “I am grateful for Mitchell and Margo Blutt and their ongoing, generous support for boosting Penn and its academic enterprise.”
Dr. Light has been a member of the Wharton faculty since 2013, when she joined as an assistant professor. She rose to become an associate professor with tenure in 2019 and was promoted to a full professor of legal studies and business ethics in 2023. Dr. Light’s research focuses on climate and environmental law and policy and private environmental governance. Also serving as the faculty co-director of Wharton’s Climate Center, Dr. Light’s research and other academic activities advance the study and dialogue of issues that sit at the intersection of corporate sustainability and business innovation.
“Mitchell and Margo Blutt are stalwart members of the Penn community, giving their time and resources to myriad important causes across the University,” said Dean James. “I am immensely grateful for their longstanding support of the Wharton School, including their most recent Presidential Professorship.”
“Professor Light’s research examines critical aspects of environmental policy, governance, and business practices, and will undoubtedly influence how corporations address sustainability issues in the 21st century. This professorship is an investment in our exceptional faculty and supports our students in their exploration and understanding of the role of business in addressing climate challenges.”
The Blutts have supported a breadth of initiatives across Penn, giving to the Wharton School, the Perelman School of Medicine, Penn Athletics, Penn Engineering, Penn Arts & Sciences, and the School of Social Policy and Practice. In addition to their three named Presidential professorships, they further support teaching and research through their contributions to the Jean-Marie Kneeley President’s Distinguished Professorship, the Mitchell Blutt, MD Visiting Professorship in Entrepreneurism and Medicine Endowed Fund, and the Penn National Clinician Scholars Program Endowment Fund.
Extending their generosity to students, Mitchell and Margo Blutt have established an MD/MBA scholarship for medical students who have studied business as well as a scholarship for students at Penn Arts & Sciences. They have given to the Alumni Association Fellowship Fund in honor of June Kinney, for Wharton MBA students in healthcare management, and the Blutt Endowed Internship, for business and research internships in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences & Management.
In addition to their contributions to Penn students, faculty, and research, the Blutts have enriched arts and cultural opportunities at Penn through the Blutt Singer-Songwriter Symposium, the Blutt Band Slam, and the Blutt College House Music Program.
Dr. Blutt said, “It has been a joy for us to be able to create, fortify, and enhance worthy causes across Penn, from formative student experiences to backing faculty and, through them, their research. It is an honor and privilege for us to help advance the careers of exceptional Wharton professors, especially those who make significant contributions to the most important issues we face as a society.”
Dr. Blutt is the CEO of Consonance Capital, an investment firm focused in healthcare. In addition to his multiple Penn degrees, he and Margo Blutt are proud Penn parents, with their son having graduated in 2023. Rounding out the family’s generosity with service, Dr. Blutt is a former Penn Trustee and past Penn Medicine Board member. He currently serves as a member of the Wharton Board of Advisors and an emeritus member of the School of Arts & Sciences Board of Advisors. The University has honored his many contributions through Penn’s Alumni Award of Merit in 2018 and the School of Medicine’s Alumni Service Award in 2007.
Catherine McDonald: Chair of the Department of Family and Community Health in Penn Nursing
Catherine C. McDonald has been appointed chair of Penn Nursing’s department of family and community health (FCH), effective July 1, 2024. Currently, she is the vice-chair of the department and the Dr. Hildegarde Reynolds Endowed Term Chair of Primary Care Nursing.
“Dr. McDonald is an accomplished and well-respected researcher in injury science who has demonstrated strong leadership abilities both within and outside of Penn Nursing,” said Penn Nursing dean Antonia M. Villarruel. “As vice chair of FCH, she has excelled at providing mentoring and support to faculty teaching in the undergraduate program and she supports and provides direction for innovative teaching and curricular approaches. Her service and leadership also extend beyond our school and have been impactful at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and as secretary of the University Faculty Senate. She is ideally qualified to take on this key leadership role.”
Dr. McDonald is a pediatric nurse scientist with a focused program of research aimed at promoting health and reducing injury in youth. She leads a strong portfolio of research on adolescent injury prevention funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC). She has published over 80 peer-reviewed journal articles on injury prevention for children and adolescents in the topics of driving behaviors, motor vehicle crashes, child passenger safety, concussion, and community violence exposure. Dr. McDonald is co-director of the Penn Injury Science Center (PISC)—a Centers for Disease Control-funded Injury Control Research Center. She has led research initiatives in the development of interventions for young drivers, as well as randomized controlled trial design, novel assessment of adolescent driver behavior, and recruitment and long-term retention of adolescent drivers. She is also the nursing discipline director for the Leadership Education in Adolescent Health Program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
As one of the few nurse scientists with a program of research in injury science, Dr. McDonald has collaborated with researchers at CHOP to research adolescent driving behaviors and concussion. As a nurse scientist, she has expertise in driving simulation to rigorously assess adolescent driving behaviors in a safe, controlled environment, while also being able to draw on the public health and clinical implications. In her collaboration with the Minds Matter Concussion Program at CHOP, she contributes to the advances related to school health and identifying implications for returning to driving after concussion.
Dr. McDonald’s research seeks to help improve the health of adolescents, where injury is the leading cause of death. When children and adolescents have the opportunity to attain their highest level of health and wellness, their health outcomes as adults can be improved. In identifying factors that contribute to adolescent injury morbidity and mortality, she seeks to help support policies and structures that can provide equitable opportunities for positive adolescent health outcomes. In her teaching and research training with mentees, she works to instill the foundational tenets of how nurses can play a key role in reducing factors that disadvantage or harm vulnerable groups.
Julia Hartmann: Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor in Mathematics in SAS
Julia Hartmann has been named the Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor in Mathematics in the School of Arts & Sciences. Dr. Hartmann specializes in algebra and arithmetic geometry, a new field that applies techniques from algebraic geometry to solve problems in number theory. With colleague David Harbater, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the department of mathematics, Dr. Hartmann developed the method of field patching, which has expanded the ways mathematicians can analyze the relationships between local and global behaviors of mathematical objects. Moreover, field patching has recently led to the solution of a longstanding conjecture concerning the symmetry groups of differential equations.
Dr. Hartmann serves as the faculty sponsor of Penn’s chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics and co-organizes Gender Minorities in Mathematics and Statistics (GeMs), a group of grad students, postdocs, faculty, and visitors in Penn’s math department who identify as gender minorities, along with allies.
The Langberg Professorships were established through the bequest of Eugene L. Langberg, CCC’42, G’45. The late Mr. Langberg was an electrical physicist who held positions at the U.S. Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C., and at the Franklin Institute. He also served as a commissioner of Upper Gwynedd Township, Pennsylvania. Mr. Langberg’s wife, the late Fay Ruth Moses Langberg, was a member of the College for Women Class of 1947.
Sherry (Xue) Gao: Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor in CBE in Penn Engineering
Sherry (Xue) Gao has joined the School of Engineering and Applied Science as a Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering (CBE), effective January 1, 2024. As the newest faculty member in CBE, Dr. Gao is prepared to support the next generation of chemical engineers while also conducting groundbreaking research in the development of small molecules to edit genes.
The Presidential Penn Compact Professorships were created by Penn President Emerita Amy Gutmann to recruit and support faculty like Dr. Gao: transformative leaders working at the intersection of multiple fields with “a yen for collaboration,” as Dr. Gutmann told The Pennsylvania Gazette in 2021.
Dr. Gao joins Penn Engineering from Rice University, where she received numerous accolades, including the 2024 BMES-CMBE Rising Star Award, a 2022 NSF CAREER Award, the 2022 Outstanding Young Faculty at Rice School of Engineering Award, and the 2020 NIH MIRA R35 Award.
As a member of Penn’s Center for Precision Engineering for Health (CPE4H), Dr. Gao will partner with colleagues from across the School of Engineering & Applied Science to develop technologies that bridge disciplines, all in the interest of advancing healthcare.
“We are very excited to have Sherry as a new member of the center,” said Daniel Hammer, the Alfred G. and Meta A. Ennis Professor of Bioengineering and inaugural director of CPE4H. “Gene editing is an important new tool that can precisely alter cell behavior by deleting or redirecting cell pathways, as well as enhancing and suppressing gene expression. She will have significant interactions with other members of the center, such as Mike Mitchell and myself, as well as the broader Penn community, especially with the CAR therapists.”
One of Dr. Gao’s primary goals is to make gene-editing tools more accurate. As Dr. Gao has discovered, CRISPR, the revolutionary technology developed by Nobel-prize winners Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, doesn’t always work perfectly. More generally, Dr. Gao is fascinated by enzymes, the class of molecules to which CRISPR belongs, which enable chemical reactions by lowering the activation energy required for a reaction to take place.
This fall, Dr. Gao will teach a course on genetic engineering, which will be open to both graduate and undergraduate students. She is also developing a course within CBE to focus on biomolecules, with a particular interest in enzymes.
Progress of the Presidential Commission on Countering Hate and Building Community
The Presidential Commission on Countering Hate and Building Community was convened and charged on December 20, 2023 by Interim President J. Larry Jameson. The commission, which consists of faculty, staff, students, alumni, trustees, and two ex-officio members, was tasked to address bias, discrimination, and hate on campus as Penn strives to be a community that leads with care and compassion. The commission met with Interim President Jameson last month to share the progress that has been made.
To read the executive summary in its entirety, visit https://president.upenn.edu/initiatives/presidential-commission/progress-update.
The commission has encouraged community input via a dedicated email address since January, and recently unveiled a series of in-person and virtual small group listening sessions and a new survey for students, faculty, staff, and postdocs.