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Dare. Think big. Take risks. Seek out fresh experiences.
Such were the messages delivered at May commencement ceremonies for Northeastern undergraduates, graduate and adult students, and law students.
Those exhorting the grads to go on to great things have done so themselves.
Nicholas Negroponte, cofounder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory and creator of the nonprofit One Laptop per Child, spoke to more than two thousand graduating seniors and their families at the May 5 morning ceremony in the TD Banknorth Garden. Negroponte’s nonprofit manufactures $100 laptops for children in developing and impoverished nations. The heavy-duty self-charging laptops include wireless Internet capability.
People called his idea crazy at first, Negroponte said. He told graduates they shouldn’t listen to that kind of criticism.
“When someone tells you ‘to get real’ or ‘you’re not realistic,’ that is, for me at least, code words for ‘go for it,’” Negroponte said.
Student speaker Sergio Marrero echoed Negroponte’s advice. Noting that seniors have already achieved much, he said, “Your time is now. Dare to change the world.”
In a separate afternoon ceremony, more than nine hundred graduate and adult learners heard from physician Deborah Prothrow-Stith, professor of public-health practice and associate dean for faculty development at the Harvard School of Public Health.
As the first woman public-health commissioner in Massachusetts, Prothrow-Stith, nationally recognized for her research on violence prevention, established the first office of violence prevention in a state department of public health.
Like the morning speakers, Prothrow-Stith urged graduates to take risks and buck established trends. “Things can change,” she said, “and you can help make them change.”
At the May 25 School of Law commencement ceremony in Matthews Arena, approximately two hundred future lawyers listened as Nonnie Burnes, L’78, state insurance commissioner and former longtime Massachusetts judge, urged them to dedicate themselves to social causes.
“Every day, lawyers are offered the opportunity to advance the public good,” Burnes told the graduates. “You just have to train yourself to look for the opportunity.”
Associate law professor Daniel Williams advised graduates to “practice law with a little bit of the vagabond spirit.”
He added, “Don’t let anybody make you feel guilty for being a vagabond.”
— Karen Feldscher
May 5: Commencement for Undergraduates
“Peace, eliminating poverty, the environment—solutions to those big problems include education.” – Nicholas Negroponte
Commencement Speaker
Nicholas Negroponte
Doctor of Public Service
A pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, Nicholas Negroponte is considered one of the world’s foremost futurists. As a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he helped establish the MIT Media Laboratory, which opened in 1985. Early in the digital era, the Media Lab blazed trails in such now-familiar areas as digital video and multimedia. Today, it increasingly explores the overlap of electronic information and the everyday physical world. Negroponte is currently on leave from MIT, where he remains the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology, to devote more time to One Laptop per Child, a nonprofit he founded and chairs, which seeks to better the education of children in developing countries by providing them with specially designed inexpensive laptops.
Bernard M. Gordon
Doctor of Science
Entrepreneur, inventor, and National Medal of Technology recipient Bernard M. Gordon has helped realize dozens of technological milestones, such as the dot-matrix display, fetal monitors, and digital Doppler radar. After founding and building Analogic Corporation, which creates high-performance medical and security imaging systems, Gordon cofounded NeuroLogica Corporation, which develops high-quality imaging equipment that helps physicians make timely diagnostic and treatment decisions. Since the early 1990s, Gordon and his wife, Sophia, have distributed more than $100 million through the Gordon Foundation to train engineers and scientists, and support educational and medical initiatives. In 2006, the foundation gave Northeastern a $20 million gift in support of the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program and the Bernard M. Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems.
Sylvia Manning
Doctor of Humane Letters
An English language and literature scholar, Sylvia Manning is the chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), a position she’s held for seven years. UIC is the Chicago area’s largest university, with 25,000 students, and one of the nation’s leading academic research centers. A native of Montreal, Canada, Manning has held faculty positions at California State University, Hayward, and the University of Southern California, where she also served as vice provost for undergraduate studies and executive vice provost. She then spent five years as vice president for academic affairs for the University of Illinois system, where, among other accomplishments, she led the creation of University of Illinois Online.
May 5: Commencement for Graduate Students
"A little boy who watches his mother get beaten on Sunday has a different set of needs in school on Monday morning" – Deborah Prothrow-Stith
Commencement Speaker
Deborah Prothrow-Stith
Physician, social scientist, and innovative advocate, Deborah Prothrow-Stith is associate dean and professor of public-health practice at the Harvard School of Public Health. Widely known as a national spokesperson for violence prevention, she urges using rigorous scientific methods to strengthen violence-prevention programs. Early in her career, while working as a physician in inner-city Boston, Prothrow-Stith sought to have youth violence defined as a public-health problem, not just a criminal-justice issue.
In 1987, she became the first woman commissioner of public health for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She has authored or coauthored more than eighty publications on medical and public-health issues.
George W. Chamillard
Doctor of Business Administration
Former Teradyne CEO and chairman George W. Chamillard, UC’66, MBA’70, has earned distinction as an influential corporate executive. He joined Teradyne, a leading supplier of automatic test equipment, as an engineer in 1969, when the company had $10 million in sales. Named vice president in 1986, president in 1996, CEO in 1997, and
chairman in 2000, Chamillard guided Teradyne until stepping down as CEO in 2004 and as chairman in 2006. By then, Teradyne had sales of $1.4 billion and employed approximately 4,000 people worldwide. Chamillard is a member of Northeastern’s Board of Trustees and recently chaired the university’s presidential search committee.
George J. Kostas
Doctor of Science
A pioneer in synthetic rubber development and manufacturing, George J. Kostas, E’43, is a successful entrepreneur and generous philanthropist.
He has spent more than three decades leading Techno-Economic Services (Tesco), which developed the “Xenoclad,” a revolutionary process based on Kostas’s patents for plating aluminum in an atomic form on metal substrates, rendering them resistant to corrosion. Kostas has also been a generous philanthropist, providing critical support for Northeastern’s work in nanotechnology, the science of manipulating particles at the molecular level. In 2005, Northeastern dedicated the George J. Kostas Nanoscale Technology and Manufacturing Research Center.
May 25: Law Commencement
“To be a great lawyer, you have to have the right attitude. Don’t look at the hazards. Look at the opportunities.” – Nonnie Burnes
Commencement Speaker
Nonnie Burnes
Doctor of Public Service
Nonnie Burnes, L’78, is the Massachusetts commissioner of insurance, appointed earlier this year by Governor Deval Patrick. Previously, she spent more than a decade as an associate justice on the state’s Superior Court. Before becoming a justice, Burnes was a partner at Hill & Barlow. She has served as a commissioner on the State Ethics Commission and vice chair of the Boston Bar Association.
In 2004, she received the Boston Bar Association’s Citation for Judicial Excellence. Currently, she sits on the visiting committee for the Center for Ethics and the Professions at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and on Northeastern’s Board of Trustees.
Sonia Sotomayor
Doctor of Laws
Since 1998, Bronx native Sonia Sotomayor has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the first Puerto Rican woman to do so. Early in her career, she worked as an assistant district attorney in the New York County District Attorney’s Office, then entered private practice in New York City. In 1992, she took a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. In March 1995, she issued the preliminary injunction that prevented Major League Baseball from unilaterally implementing a new collective bargaining agreement and using replacement players, thus ending the 1994 baseball strike. Sotomayor has served as a member of the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts.
Michael Greco
Doctor of Public Service
A partner at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis and immediate past president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Michael Greco is a trial lawyer with more than thirty-five years of business-litigation experience, and a state, national, and international arbitrator and mediator. During his ABA presidency, he appointed the Task Force on Access to Civil Justice, which offered landmark support for ensuring the poor have access to civil-legal services. Greco has also led the development of materials on the constitutional system for use in schools. He continues to be an advocate for ethical practice and the right of people to civil representation.