Commencement Speaker and Honorary Degree Recipients

Elizabeth Banks, Honorary Doctor of Arts and 2025 Commencement Speaker

Actress and director of film and television
Co-founder of Brownstone Productions, an American film and television production company

University of Pennsylvania 1996 graduate Elizabeth Banks is an actor, producer, writer, and director known for her dynamic career across film, theater, television, and activism. Her work includes stand-out performances in projects including The Hunger Games franchise, Love & Mercy, and W. Banks is also a three-time Emmy nominee for her recurring roles in 30 Rock and Modern Family.

Banks made her directorial debut in 2015 with Pitch Perfect 2, which achieved the highest opening weekend for a musical, the biggest opener for a first-time director, and the second-largest opening for a female director. She then starred in and produced Pitch Perfect 3 (2017) and later directed Charlie's Angels (2019) and the hit comedy-thriller Cocaine Bear (2023).

Banks and her husband, Max Handelman, co-founded Brownstone Productions in 2002. The company, with exclusive deals at Warner Bros. Television and Universal, is behind several successful projects, including Pitch Perfect, Shrill, Bottoms, and Cocaine Bear. Their work spans across various studios and networks such as Universal, Sony Pictures, HBO Max, and Netflix.

Beyond her creative work, Banks is passionate about charity, supporting causes like women’s rights, reproductive freedom, and gender equality in Hollywood. She has testified before Congress and produced content highlighting the importance of choice and family planning. Banks supports charities like the Center for Reproductive Rights as Chair of the Creative Council, Planned Parenthood, Heifer International, and the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund.

Banks is also co-owner and Chief Creative Officer of Archer Roose Wines, a female-founded luxury canned wine company that has national distribution with major retailers across the United States.

This spring, she will be seen in Amazon’s The Better Sister, alongside Jessica Biel, and is currently in production on Peacock’s The Miniature Wife opposite Matthew MacFadyen. Originally from Massachusetts, Banks earned her graduate degree at the American Conservatory Theater.

Lonnie G. Bunch III, Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters

Historian, educator, curator, author
Fourteenth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

Lonnie G. Bunch III became the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution on June 16, 2019. As such, he oversees 21 museums, 21 libraries, the National Zoo, numerous research centers, and several education units and centers. 

Previously, Bunch was Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the nation’s largest and most comprehensive cultural destination devoted exclusively to exploring, documenting, and showcasing the African American story and its impact on American and world history. Before his appointment as Director of the museum, Bunch served as President of the Chicago Historical Society (2001–2005). 

Bunch previously worked at the Smithsonian, holding several positions at the National Museum of American History from 1989 through 2000. As the museum’s Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs from 1994–2000, he oversaw the curatorial and collections management staff.  Bunch served as the Curator of History and Program Manager for the California African American Museum in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1989. 

Born in Belleville, New Jersey, Bunch has held numerous teaching positions at universities across the country, including American University, the University of Massachusetts, and George Washington University.

Among his many awards, he received the Freedom Medal from the Roosevelt Institute for his contribution to American culture; the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from the Hutchins Center at Harvard University; and the National Equal Justice Award from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. The Society of American Historians awarded Bunch the Tony Horwitz Prize honoring distinguished work in American history. In addition, he received the inaugural David McCullough Award for outstanding work in Public History and the Dan David Prize from Tel Aviv University, among others. In 2021, Bunch received France’s highest award, The Legion of Honor.

Bunch earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from American University in Washington, DC.

Lene Vestergaard Hau, Honorary Doctor of Sciences

Physicist and pioneer in quantum optics
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics at Harvard University 

Lene Vestergaard Hau is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics at Harvard University. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 1999, Hau was a Senior Scientist at the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She holds a PhD in Physics from University of Aarhus, Denmark.

Hau led a team that succeeded in slowing a pulse of light to 15 miles per hour and also brought light to a stop. They took matters further as they stopped and extinguished a light pulse in one part of space, and subsequently revived it in a different location. In the process, the light pulse is converted to a perfect matter copy that can be stored, sculpted, and then turned back to light. These results represent the ultimate quantum control of light and matter.

Hau has contributed to a wide variety of research fields, including experimental and theoretical optical and atomic physics as well as condensed matter physics.

A 2001 MacArthur Fellow, Hau was also elected to the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society.

Hau is the recipient of numerous awards, including Harvard University’s Ledlie Prize, the Ole Roemer Medal awarded by the University of Copenhagen, and the Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award awarded by the American Association of Physics Teachers. In 2018, she was honored with the Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecture and Medal, sponsored by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences through its Nobel Committee for Physics, and in 2019 with the Lars Onsager Lecture and Medal by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and the Dirac Medal and Lecture by the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and the Australian Institute of Physics.

Barbara D. Savage, Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters

Historian, scholar of twentieth century African American history
Geraldine R. Segal Professor Emerita of American Social Thought, Department of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Barbara D. Savage is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor Emerita of American Social Thought and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.  She was a member of the History Department from 1995-2013 before serving as inaugural Chair of the Department of Africana Studies from which she retired in 2020.  Savage taught graduate and undergraduate courses in twentieth century African American history; the history of American religious and social reform movements; the history of the relationship between media and politics; and black women’s political and intellectual history. 

Savage has written three award-winning books:  Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (Yale, 2023); Your Spirits Walk Beside Us:  The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard, 2008); and, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (North Carolina, 1999).  She also co-edited two field-defining volumes:  Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (North Carolina, 2015) and Women and Religion in the African Diaspora (Hopkins, 2006).

An internationally recognized scholar, Savage was in 2018-2019 the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford where a new thesis prize in Black History was named in her honor.  She also has received fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion, and the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center on Black Culture of the New York Public Library.

Savage received her doctorate in history from Yale University in 1995 and holds a law degree from Georgetown University and an undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia where she was a member of its first class of women.

Nominating an Honorary Degree Recipient

The Office of the University Secretary manages the honorary degrees process at Penn. All members of the University community are welcome to submit nominations. For information about qualifications and nominating honorary degree candidates, visit the University Secretary's Honorary Degrees webpage.

Past Penn's Commencement Speakers and Honorary Degree Recipients

• View a list of previous commencement speakers since 1938 (visit the University Secretary website)
• View a list of previous honorary degree recipients (visit the University Secretary website)