Samantha Power, the United States permanent representative to the United Nations, a member of President Obama’s cabinet and a Pulitzer-prize winning author, will deliver the address at the 2015 University of Pennsylvania Commencement on Monday, May 18, Vice President and University Secretary Leslie Laird Kruhly announced.

As U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Power works to advance U.S. interests and address pressing challenges to global peace, security and prosperity. Prior to her current role, Ambassador Power served as special assistant to President Obama and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights on the national security staff at the White House. 

“We are honored that Ambassador Samantha Power will speak at Penn’s 259th Commencement,” Penn President Amy Gutmann said. “As a national and global leader, inspiring scholar and teacher, and courageous champion of human rights, Ambassador Power has had far-ranging impact here at home and abroad. Her extraordinary record of achievement on issues including LGBT and women’s rights, the promotion of religious freedom, and the protection of religious minorities is a shining example of leadership. Moreover, the commitment to human rights that Power exemplifies is an integral component of a Penn education preparing our graduates to go out to change the world as well-informed, responsible and engaged citizens.”

Ambassador Power immigrated with her family to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a juris doctoris from Harvard Law School. She began her career as a journalist, and is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Before her government service, she was the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. 

At the Commencement ceremony, Power will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. 2015 Penn honorary degree recipients sharing the stage with Power are Arthur K. Asbury, Lee C. Bollinger, Joan Myers Brown, Rita Moreno, Ellen Ochoa and Cass R. Sunstein.

“The Penn family is thrilled to have such an exceptional class of honorees and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power as our Commencement speaker,” said Andrea Mitchell, Penn trustee and chair of the Trustee Honorary Degrees Committee. “This year’s honorees, through their courage, scholarship and public service, exemplify the very highest levels of achievement. They stand as brilliant examples of inspiration for our graduates and for all of us in the University community.”

Arthur K. Asbury, Penn’s Van Meter Professor of Neurology Emeritus at the Perelman School of Medicine, is renowned for his clinical studies of peripheral neuropathies, particularly in patients with chronic kidney failure, diabetes mellitus and Guillain-Barré syndrome. His work has been published in over 230 articles, chapters and books. After his arrival at Penn in 1973, Asbury held many leadership roles including chair of neurology, interim dean and executive vice president of Penn’s Medical Center, vice dean for research and for faculty affairs and again as interim dean of the School in 2000-2001. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal College of Physicians. He will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Sciences degree.

Lee C. Bollinger is one of the country’s foremost First Amendment and legal scholars and has served since 2002 as Columbia University’s nineteenth president. He is the author of a number of books on the value of racial, cultural and socio-economic diversity to American society and on the freedom of speech and the press. From 1996 to 2002, while president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he led the school’s historic litigation leading to two U.S. Supreme Court decisions which upheld diversity as a justification for affirmative action in higher education. Bollinger is the recipient of the National Humanitarian Award from the National Conference for Community and Justice and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s National Equal Justice Award. He will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

Joan Myers Brown is the founder and executive artistic director of the widely acclaimed Philadelphia School of Dance Arts and the Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO). Now the resident modern dance company at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, PHILADANCO tours globally. A former dancer, choreographer and director, Brown has spent decades working on behalf of dancers, in particular African American dancers seeking opportunities in professional mainstream dance. She is a distinguished visiting professor at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, and a member of the dance faculty at Howard University. In 2012, Brown received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama, the nation's highest civic honor for excellence in the arts. She will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Arts degree. 

Rita Moreno is an award-winning performing artist and star of film, stage and television, with the rare distinction of having received the entertainment industries’ four most prestigious awards: the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. She is also the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts and a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. A native of Puerto Rico and one of her industry's busiest performers, Moreno's career spans more than six decades. Making her Broadway debut at age 13, Moreno has appeared in such classic films as West Side Story and Singin' in the Rain, and is widely recognized for her work on the educational program The Electric Company. Her book, Rita Moreno: A Memoir, was a New York Times bestseller. She will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Arts degree.  

Ellen Ochoa is a veteran astronaut and the eleventh director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, home to “Mission Control” and NASA's astronaut corps. Ochoa is the first Hispanic to serve in that role, and in 1993 became the first Hispanic woman to go to space as a member of the nine-day mission aboard the space shuttle Discovery. She logged nearly 1,000 hours in space over four missions as a mission specialist, flight engineer and payload commander. Early in her career as a researcher at NASA, she investigated optical systems for performing information processing, becoming a co-inventor on three patents. Ochoa is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Harvard Foundation Science Award and the Women in Aerospace Outstanding Achievement Award. She will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Sciences degree. 

Cass R. Sunstein is an author and American legal scholar in the fields of constitutional, administrative and environmental law, as well as law and behavioral economics. He is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University and the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. For 27 years, he taught at the University of Chicago Law School. From 2009 to 2012, he served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He is a contributing editor to The New Republic and The American Prospect. His latest book is Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter. He will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

Honorees Power and Sunstein are married.