In addition to commencement speaker Lord Christopher Patten, the chancellor of Oxford University, Notre Dame will award six honorary degrees at its 170th Commencement ceremony on May 17, the University announced in a press release Monday.
The honorary degree recipients, whose accomplishments span the fields of education, business, medicine and religion, are: Freeman A. Hrabowski III, John E. Kelly III, Jane McAuliffe, Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, Shirley Welsh Ryan and Fr. Thomas F. Stransky.
Hrabowski, who has served as the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County since 1992, will receive a doctor of laws degree, the release stated. A mathematician who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, during the peak of the civil rights movement, Hrabowski also serves as the chair of the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans.
Kelly, senior vice president of solutions portfolio and research for IBM, will receive a doctor of engineering degree. He has held several different positions at IBM, beginning in 1980, and helped redesign the semiconductor processing and device fabrication clean room in Stinson-Remick Hall of Engineering, according to the release.
McAuliffe serves as the director of the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, which gives scholars the opportunity to research and interact with members of Congress, and will receive a doctor of laws degree. She has previously worked as the president of Bryn Mawr College from 2008 to 2013 and as as dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University from 1999 to 2008. According to the release, McAuliffe is also a scholar of the Qur'an and early Islamic history.
Quiñones-Hinojosa works as a professor of neurosurgery and oncology and director of the brain tumor surgery program at Johns Hopkins Hospital and will receive a doctor of science degree. According to the release, he was born in a small village outside of Mexicali, Mexico, and graduated from both the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard Medical School.
Ryan, who along with her son Corbett, a 2005 Notre Dame graduate, are the namesakes of Ryan Hall, will receive a doctor of laws degree. She is a trustee emerita of the University and served on the National Council on Disability, which led to the American with Disabilities Act, the release stated.
Stransky, a Paulist priest and the rector emeritus of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem, will receive a doctor of laws degree. According to the release, Stransky contributed heavily to one of the Second Vatican Council's most important documents, the 1965 Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. Stransky is also a former president of the Paulist fathers.
