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IBM Chief Virginia "Ginni" Rometty will address the Class of 2015 during Northwestern’s 157th commencement ceremony at 9:30 a.m. on Friday, June 19 at Ryan Field.
Rometty is one of four distinguished individuals receiving honorary degrees.
Chairman, president and chief executive officer of IBM, an American multinational technology and consulting corporation, Rometty has been ranked number one in Fortune Magazine’s “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” for the last three years.
The other individuals being recognized include Tony and Grammy award-winning actor and singer Audra McDonald, professor Dan Shechtman and professor Margaret Beale Spencer.
McDonald is the only person to win all four of the Tony’s acting categories. She has been in five full-length feature films, sung with leading orchestras worldwide, and has recorded five solo albums.
Schectman joined Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1975 and is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of quasi-periodic crystals, a fundamentally new category of materials.
Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education and Professor of Life Course Human Development at the University of Chicago in the department of comparative human development, Professor Spencer is the Board of Overseers Professor of both Education and Applied Psychology and Human Development Division at the University of Pennsylvania.