During the 374th Commencement this morning, Harvard will confer honorary degrees on six distinguished recipients including Rita Moreno and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Three men and three women will be honored:
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA star who became a force for social justice;
- Richard Alley, a glaciologist expert in the impacts of ice sheets on climate and sea level;
- Esther Duflo, a scholar of poverty interventions and winner of a Nobel Prize in economics;
- Elaine H. Kim, a pioneer of Asian American studies and the immigrant experience;
- Rita Moreno, actress, singer, and dancer—the star of numerous Hollywood musicals; and
- Abraham Verghese, the physician, writer, and professor of medicine.
Brief biographies of today’s honorands appear below. (The guest speaker—this year Abraham Verghese—has traditionally been recognized as the final degree recipient.) For details on the conferrals, check back for coverage of the Commencement ceremonies later today at www.harvardmagazine.com.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: A star professional basketball player, now a writer and activist, Abdul-Jabbar delivered the Class Day address to graduating seniors yesterday, May 28 (read about his speech here). He is widely regarded as one of the greatest basketball players of all time. During his two-decade career, he earned 19 NBA All-Star selections and won six championships. Named “History’s Greatest Player” by Time magazine, he remains the only player in NBA history to win six Most Valuable Player awards.
After retiring in 1989, Abdul-Jabbar turned his focus to activism, writing, and public speaking. He has contributed to major media, writing about sports, politics, and popular culture, and now publishes regularly on his Substack newsletter. He has also written 20 books, spanning memoirs, history, and fiction. His work often addresses the country’s legacies of racism and inequality—an interest that began in his youth, when he met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at his high school in Harlem.
In 2012, Abdul-Jabbar was appointed U.S. Cultural Ambassador by the State Department, tasked with promoting education, racial tolerance, and cross-cultural understanding among youth around the world. In 2021, the NBA established the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion Award to honor athletes making a positive impact in their communities. In 2022, his public service efforts earned him Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal. He is also the founder and chair of The Skyhook Foundation, which provides STEM education to underserved communities in Los Angeles.
Richard Alley: Pugh University Professor of Geosciences at the Pennsylvania State University, Alley’s ice and climate exploration group studies the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets from space, in the field, and with computer models to understand their history and their future. Unlike the sea ice that covers the North Pole, these land-based ice sheets and mountain glaciers are contributing to sea-level rise, and Alley is a leader in figuring out how fast they will melt, whether slowly or catastrophically. That work has implications for the speed at which human civilization will need to prepare and adapt.
His first attempt at a Ph.D. thesis, he says, “melted” when the sample ice cores he had collected turned to liquid during transport. Since then, he has collected cores that record the planet’s climate history over long time spans and written hundreds of scientific papers. He is also a skilled communicator of science. He was host of the 2011-2012 PBS television program EARTH: The Operator’s Manual, and published a companion book of the same name for general audiences.
Alley was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2025 by President Joseph Biden, in part for work to understand how ice affects patterns of ocean circulation, and for his discovery that Earth’s great ice sheets melted suddenly at the end of the last ice age.
Esther Duflo: At MIT, Duflo helped develop an experimental approach to poverty alleviation, using randomized controlled trials to test the efficacy of various interventions. The Jameel professor of poverty alleviation and development economics at MIT, Duflo was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in economics together with her long-term collaborators Michael Kremer and Abhijit Banerjee (who is also her husband).
Born in a suburb of Paris, where her mother was a pediatrician and her father a professor of mathematics, Duflo was educated in local schools before gaining admission to the École Normale Supérieure. There, she was introduced by a mentor to economics, which she temporarily gave up after graduation to become a French teaching assistant in Moscow. But economics called again, and she got a “ringside view of the process of economic reforms in Russia” during the 1993-1994 year, working for a team advising the Ministry of Finance. In Russia, she met Thomas Piketty, then teaching at MIT, and he persuaded her to take up graduate study there in 1995.
There she has remained, founding in 2003 the Poverty Action Lab, now affiliated with a network of several hundred professors from around the world. Hundreds of millions of people living in poverty have benefited from policies scaled up after the lab’s evaluation proved them effective. Her ongoing work covers a broad range of topics related to global poverty, including agriculture, health care, and education.
Elaine H. Kim: Professor emerita in Asian American studies and ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Kim is a writer and editor who has led the way in studies of the Asian immigrant experience. After receiving her B.A. in English and American Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, she earned an M.A. from Columbia University, and then a Ph.D. in social foundations of education from UC Berkeley, where in 1969 she helped found the Asian American studies program of ethnic studies.
Her research has focused on literature, culture, and feminism, among other topics, and been recognized with numerous awards: the lifetime achievement award of the Association for Asian American Studies (2011), the group’s book award in cultural studies (2005), and the Asian Pacific American Heritage lifetime achievement award from the city and county of San Francisco (2012).
Kim is also a community activist. Outside the confines of academia, she co-founded the organization Asian Women United of California (1976), which produced documentaries about Asian American women’s experiences in the workforce. She also helped found the Korean Community Center in the San Francisco Bay area, which provides legal assistance to people experiencing immigration issues, as well as services for the elderly.
Rita Moreno: Dancer, singer, and actress Rita Moreno has appeared in some of Hollywood’s best-known movie musicals, including Singin’ in the Rain (1952), The King and I (1956) and West Side Story (1961), in which she played the character of Anita who famously sings about life in America, and for which she won an Academy Award for best supporting actress.
Born Rosa Dolores Alverío in Puerto Rico in 1931, Moreno came to New York City with her mother as a child, and took dancing lessons. At 13, she made her Broadway debut in Skydrift, which led to offers from Hollywood—but the roles she was asked to play were often stereotyped depictions of ethnic minorities. After a seven-year hiatus from Hollywood during which she acted mainly in summer theater, she returned to the entertainment industry, eventually winning an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and Tony during the course of a 70-year career.
She has appeared in films, on television (including The Electric Company, The Muppet Show, and The Rockford Files). In 1993, she was invited to perform at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration. In 2004, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush, M.B.A. ’75 for her contributions to the arts. And in 2009, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, J.D. ’91.
Abraham Verghese: A physician and writer who is a professor of medicine at Stanford University, Verghese will be the principal speaker at Harvard’s 374th Commencement exercises this morning, May 29. Verghese emigrated from war-torn Ethiopia, where his Indian parents were both teachers, to the United States in 1974. He went to India for his medical degree before returning to the United States for his medical residency in Johnson, Tennessee. There, he witnessed firsthand the impact of HIV/AIDS on the local gay population, which became the subject of his first book, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story (1994). Verghese has since written a second memoir, The Tennis Partner, and two novels, Cutting for Stone and The Covenant of Water.
Throughout his written work and in his practice, Verghese has emphasized the importance of the physician-patient relationship. At Stanford, he founded Presence, an interdisciplinary center that promotes the importance of the human experience in medicine, and the initiative Stanford Medicine 25, which fosters skills in the longstanding bedside exam for students and medical professionals.
In 2016, Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2016 by President Barack Obama, “For reminding us that the patient is the center of the medical enterprise. His range of proficiency embodies the diversity of the humanities; from his efforts to emphasize empathy in medicine, to his imaginative renderings of the human drama.”
President Alan Garber, who overlapped with Verghese at Stanford, said that he “has followed his wide-ranging interests to carve a unique path distinguished by breathtaking creativity, outstanding achievement, and exemplary service and leadership. He has pursued excellence across disciplines with an intensity surpassed only by his humanity, which shines brilliantly through his works of both fiction and non-fiction, as well as his work as a clinician and teacher. I count myself among his legion of admirers, and I cannot imagine a better individual to inspire the members of our class of 2025 as they contemplate their futures.”
Read a detailed account of Verghese’s work and life here.
