Honorary Degree Recipients Named for Penn's 249th Commencement

PHILADELPHIA -- Grammy-award-winning musician and producer Quincy Jones, philosopher Saul A. Kripke, Comcast-founder Ralph J. Roberts, journalist Judy Woodruff, and Nancy Fugate Woods, dean of the University of Washington School of Nursing have been named along with speaker Kofi Annan as the honorary degree recipients at the University of Pennsylvania's 249th Commencement ceremony.

The ceremony will be held, Monday, May 16 at Franklin Field, 33rd and South streets.

• Quincy Jones -- In a musical career that has spanned six decades, Quincy Jones has distinguished himself as a bandleader, a solo artist, a sideman, a songwriter, a producer, an arranger, a film composer, and a record label executive.   He is the artist with the single greatest number of Grammy nominations, with a total of 79 nominations and 27 awards, and has also received an Emmy Award, seven Oscar nominations, and the 1995 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
• Saul A. Kripke -- A professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Saul A. Kripke's work has had a pioneering effect in fields as diverse as mathematics, linguistics, computer and information science, and law. Since 1959, he has published several seminal papers on modal logic.  His books include "Naming and Necessity" and "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition."  He received the Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy from the Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2001.
• Ralph J. Roberts -- Penn alumnus Ralph J. Roberts is founder and chairman of the executive and finance committee of Comcast Corporation. Starting with the purchase of a single cable television system in Tupelo, Miss., in 1963, Roberts went on to create the largest cable television company in the United States, employing 59,000 people nationwide. Mr. Roberts graduated from the Wharton School in 1941 and served a four-year tour of duty in the U.S. Navy.
• Judy Woodruff Host of CNN's "Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics," Woodruff spent 10 years as the chief Washington correspondent for "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour", has anchored PBS's  "Frontline,"  and served as NBC News' White House correspondent from 1977 to 1982, covering both the Carter and Reagan administrations.   Woodruff is a founding co-chair of the International Women's Media Foundation.
• Nancy Fugate Woods -- Dean of the School of Nursing, and professor in the Department of Family and Child Nursing at the University of Washington, Nancy Fugate Woods has led the development of women's health as a field of study in nursing science.  Her current research focuses on mid-life women, their health and health-seeking behavior patterns. She has served as president of the American Academy of Nursing, the North American Menopause Society, and the Society for Menstrual Research.

Additional Penn Commencement information is available by calling 215-573-4723 or by visiting  www.upenn.edu/commencement.