Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards will adress Barnard Graduates on May 18 of this year at Radio City Music Hall. Congratulating the senior alongside Richards will be Social Ethics Scholar, Mahzarin Banaji, charmain and CEO of Xerox Ursula Burns, and musician, artist and poet Patti Smith. What do you think of Barnard’s Commencement speaker and honorees? Tweet at us at @HCBarnard
Below you will find bios of our commencement guests:
A nationally respected leader in the field of women’s health and reproductive rights, Cecile Richards is the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Since joining Planned Parenthood in 2006, Ms. Richards has expanded its advocacy for access to health care and ensured that Planned Parenthood played a pivotal role in shaping health care coverage and services for women under the Affordable Care Act. Prior to Planned Parenthood, Ms. Richards was deputy chief of staff to House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. In 2004, she founded and served as president of America Votes, a coalition of grassroots organizations working to maximize voter participation. Ms. Richards currently serves on the board of the Ford Foundation.
Mahzarin Banaji is Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the department of psychology at Harvard University, and simultaneously, George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Chair in Human Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute. Prior to teaching at Harvard, she was a professor of psychology at Yale from 1986 to 2002. Ms. Banaji is devoted to undergraduate and graduate education, serving as head tutor at Harvard and director of undergraduate studies at Yale, where she won the university’s Lex Hixon Prize for teaching excellence. Dr. Banaji studies unconscious thinking and feeling as they unfold in social contexts, and has primarily researched social attitudes and beliefs in adults and children. Her current interests focus on the origins of social cognition and applications of implicit cognition to improve organizational practices.
Ursula M. Burns is chairman and chief executive officer of Xerox, the world’s leading enterprise for business process and document management. Burns was named CEO in July 2009, and shortly thereafter made the largest acquisition in Xerox history, the $6.4 billion purchase of Affiliated Computer Services. Named chairman of the company in 2010, Ms. Burns leads the 140,000 employees of Xerox who serve clients in more than 160 countries. In addition to the Xerox board, she is a board member of the American Express Corporation and Exxon Mobil Corporation. Ms. Burns also provides leadership counsel to community, educational and non-profit organizations including the National Academy Foundation, MIT, and the U.S. Olympic Committee. She is a founding board director of Change the Equation, which focuses on improving the U.S. education system in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). In March 2010, President Barack Obama appointed her vice chair of the President’s Export Council.