Turing Award Winner Goldwasser and Nobel Laureate Yonath to Receive Honorary Degrees

Turing Award winner Shafi Goldwasser and Nobel Laureate Ada Yonath will receive honorary degrees at Carnegie Mellon's 121st Commencement on Sunday, May 20. The ceremony will be held at 11 a.m. in Gesling Stadium on campus. Goldwasser earned her bachelor's degree in applied mathematics from Carnegie Mellon's Mellon College of Science (MCS) in 1979, Yonath completed postdoctoral research in chemistry at MCS in 1969.

Goldwasser and Yonath will join philanthropist and investment icon David Tepper and award winning actor Ted Danson in receiving honorary degrees. Tepper will also give the keynote address at the university's commencement ceremony.

"It is a CMU tradition to award honorary degrees to exemplary leaders, who serve as role models for our graduates and the entire Carnegie Mellon community," said Jahanian. "This year's esteemed honorees embody this tradition, having received pre-eminent levels of distinction in their fields and exhibited a record of extraordinary contributions to society."

Mathematical Sciences alumnus Goldwasser received the 2012 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for her influential research in cryptography and security. The Turing Award is the highest recognition in computer science and often referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing. She is a two-time winner of the ACM's Gödel Prize for her outstanding papers in theoretical computer science.

Winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, former chemistry post-doc Yonath is the Kimmel Professor of Structural Biology and director of the Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. She earned the Nobel Prize for her pioneering independent studies of the structure and function of the ribosome, specifically uncovering what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level.

More than 5,600 bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees will be conferred at Carnegie Mellon's main commencement ceremony.

The ceremony will be webcast at http://www.cmu.edu/commencement.

Originally published: https://www.cmu.edu/mcs/news-events/2018/0329_HDR-Commencement.html