Duke University will welcome General Motors CEO Mary Barra as commencement speaker and honor four honorary degree recipients at its commencement exercises on Sunday, May 8, in Wallace Wade Stadium, President Vincent Price announced Tuesday. The ceremony begins at 9 a.m. and is open to the public.
This year’s group of honorary degree recipients includes individuals whose career paths took surprising turns, including a medical missionary, a scientist turned entrepreneur, a former NASA engineer who led the Girl Scouts and a development economist who is working to improve the lives of Africans.
Barra received an honorary degree from Duke in 2018 and is a member of the university’s board of trustees. Barra is the first woman to lead a major auto company. She was elected chair of the GM board of directors in 2016, two years after becoming CEO.
General Motors’ vision is a world with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion, and as CEO, her focus is on advancing an all-electric future that is inclusive and accessible to all.
Barra has been ranked atop the lists of the “Most Powerful Women in Business” published by both Forbes and Fortune magazines. She was ninth on Fortune’s list of the “World's 50 Greatest Leaders” in 2020 and was listed as one of the world's 100 most influential people by TIME magazine in 2021.
Barra began her career with GM in 1980, inspecting hoods and fender panels at the Pontiac Motor Division as a co-op student at the former General Motors Institute (now Kettering University). Before becoming CEO, she led GM’s global product development, purchasing and supply chain, global human resources, and global manufacturing engineering organizations in varying roles.
“Mary Barra models the type of business leadership needed today. She combines an acute intellect with the ability to bring out the best in others through her considerable emotional intelligence and decency,” said Bill Boulding, dean of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.
“She genuinely cares about others and takes seriously her responsibility to use business as a positive force for change,” said Boulding. “I’m thrilled Duke’s graduates will get to hear from Mary at such a pivotal time, as they consider how they will make a difference in the world.”
“I am thrilled to welcome Mary Barra and to honor these extraordinary leaders at Commencement in May,” said President Price. “They have made contributions in a diverse range of fields that have transformed countless lives, and I know that they will inspire our graduates to pursue careers of principle and purpose.”
Meet Duke’s 2022 honorary degree recipients below.
Sylvia Acevedo
DOCTOR OF SCIENCE
After growing up on a dirt road in New Mexico, Sylvia Acevedo became a trailblazer in a variety of industries. She began her career as a rocket scientist in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories, where she worked on two missions, including Voyager 2’s flyby of Jupiter. After working as a tech executive at Apple, Dell and IBM, Acevedo was appointed in 2010 by President Barack Obama to chair the White House Initiative for Educational Excellence for Hispanics in Early Childhood.
Most recently, Acevedo served as CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA. Under her leadership, millions of girls across America earned valuable skills in cybersecurity, automotive engineering, entrepreneurship, coding, robotics and leadership.
Acevedo holds a bachelor's degree with honors in industrial engineering from New Mexico State University and earned her graduate degree in engineering from Stanford University, where she was one of the first Hispanic graduates to do so.
Akinwumi A. Adesina
DOCTOR OF HUMANE LETTERS
A globally renowned development economist and agricultural development expert with more than 30 years of international experience, Akinwumi Adesina is the 8th elected president of the African Development Bank Group — Africa’s premier financial institution.
Adesina has launched a bold strategy to transform the lives of Africans called the High 5s, which has already had an impact on the lives of 335 million Africans. He serves globally as one of the Commissioners for the Global Climate Commission, co-chaired by Bill Gates and former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, to tackle global climate change, and also serves as one of 23 global leaders on a UN effort to help end hunger and malnutrition.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in agricultural economics (First Class Honors) from the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) in Nigeria and a master’s degree and Ph.D.in agricultural economics from Purdue University.
Patrick O. Brown
DOCTOR OF SCIENCE
Patrick Brown’s Impossible Foods makes meat and dairy products from plants. While on his sabbatical from Stanford University, Brown had the idea to use his training and experience in biochemistry to create nutritious food that would be better for the environment and could feed a growing global population for consumers.
Prior to starting founding Impossible Foods, Brown was a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he and his colleagues developed DNA microarrays – a new technology that made it possible to monitor the activity of all the genes in a genome. He also pioneered the use of gene expression patterns to classify cancers and improve prediction of their clinical course.
Brown received his bachelor’s degree, medical degree and Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Chicago. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine and a recipient of the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor.
Thomas G. Catena
DOCTOR OF SCIENCE
Tom Catena is the medical director and sole surgeonsole physician at Mother of Mercy Hospital in the Nuba Mountains of central Sudan — the only referral and surgical hospital in an area with a population over a million people.
When civil war broke out in 2011 and the hospital was bombed, Catena refused to leave, contending that doing so would be like saying his life is more important than the lives of his patients, which he did not accept.
Catena earned his undergraduate degree from Brown University, where he was a nose guard on the football team, and his medical degree from the Duke University School of Medicine in 1992.
He is a recipient of the Duke University Medical Alumni Distinguished Alumni Award and has been named as one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people. Catena gave the inaugural Catena Lecture at Duke Divinity School in 2019.
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